


The Effect of One Domino

by pinstripedJackalope



Series: Lizard Galra: the Series [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Autistic Keith (Voltron), Body Horror, Dark Magic, Dubious Science, Fluff and Angst, Galra Keith (Voltron), Galra Transformation, Gen, Genetic Disorders & Abnormalities, Genetic Engineering, Gore, Hurt Keith (Voltron), Hurt/Comfort, I Mean the Galra Empire is a Fascist Regime and the Druids Smack of Inhumane Experimentation, Keith (Voltron) Whump, Keith (Voltron) is a Mess, Mentions of the Holocaust, Not Canon Compliant, POV Multiple, Pidge | Katie Holt is Jewish, Platonic Cuddling, Psychological Horror, Season/Series 03, Sentient Voltron Lions, Sick Keith (Voltron), Themes of Eugenics, This Occurs Just After the Lion Swap, Trans Keith (Voltron), Transformation, Vomiting, Whump, Xenobiology, a little bit, basically this is as graphic of a galra transformation as i could make it, he doesn't get taken btw the whole thing happens in the castle, mentions of nazis, probably more angst than fluff but there is fluff and comfort, so it's not torture per se, you know how it goes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-03-28
Packaged: 2019-04-08 17:55:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 33,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14110851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope
Summary: Keith and the terrible, horrible, no good very bad day.  Knowing that he has Galra blood running through his veins is one thing--what's going to happen to him when the Galra Empire won't let that lie?Just a story about fascist totalitarian regimes summed up by one case of horrible body transmutation.





	1. The Day Hunk Has to See Keith Throw Up in His Kitchen

**Author's Note:**

> This story is 99% complete as I'm writing this note. I'll set it up so that it updates once a day, so there should be no worries about when it's going to update and if it'll ever be finished! Hope you have fun, mind the tags, and take care of yourselves.
> 
> Cheers!

It was Voltron, day forty-three post-Shiro’s Houdini act, and Keith was having a bad time.  Not bad like the time Hunk accidentally offended the Balmerans when his translator mistranslated some of his rambling and he was nearly kicked off the Balmera before they got the mess sorted out.  That was an awful ordeal, and Hunk never thought he’d feel so out of control during a food conversation, of all things.  But he did, and then they fixed it, and once it was all over it was kind of funny because now he knew that the auto-translators picked up ‘fettuccini’ as the Altean word ‘feituchenai’, which meant something like ‘a curse on the ground your mother walks on, may it crack’.  Understandably, that freaked out the people who had a symbiotic relationship with the giant living rock that served as their home planet. 

So yeah, that was bad.  But this… this was worse.  It was _his-only-unwavering-support-disappearing-into-thin-air-after-instating-him-as-leader-in-a-position-he-was-not-currently-suited-for_ bad.  _Losing-someone-and-being-forced-to-move-on-as-if-they-were-dead-for-the-second-time_ bad.  Bad in a way that caused outbursts and destructive impulses and, during one rather terrifying dinner party, a fit of tears that came on so fast that no one knew what to do before Keith slammed his fists on the table and walked out.

Hunk knew how bad it was.  He did.  And Lance knew, and he knew that Lance knew, and he knew that Keith knew that he knew that Lance knew, because _everyone_ knew.  All of them had to deal with missing a Paladin and a major piece of their collective support system, but it was apparent to anyone with emotions that the pain had struck Keith closest to the heart.  So, with all of this in mind, Hunk was more than willing to cut his teammate a bit of slack. 

That didn’t stop him from drooping his entire body forward until he was lying like a boneless mound on his lion’s control panel as he waited for someone, anyone, to _lead_ him.  He didn't even need a full-time leader—just one itty-bitty command, a direction to go in, that was all.

They were on their fifth not-so-successful mission as the _New Voltron_ lineup, and he was taking momentary cover under an ice shelf on a planet of delightful little penguin-aliens called the Zashona.  Was he allowed to feel like a deflating soufflé?  He sure thought so.  Forming Voltron was a process that required incredible finesse on the best of days, even when they had their original team—the haphazard way they were piloting now meant that Voltron was nothing more than a pipe dream, and they were getting their _asses kicked_.  He desperately wished that the Galra cruiser they were supposed to be dismantling would take pity on them and shoot itself, much like he wanted to do. 

Okay, so that was a little melodramatic.  Sue him.  It was _hard_ to listen to the nonstop bickering.  Everyone was trying desperately to control their new mechanical partners, shots going wide and limbs getting in the way of other limbs, and they’d been at it long enough now that their tentative truce in the wake of the Black Lion’s choice was long past breaking down. 

“Not to be, y’know, ‘that guy’,” Lance was saying, “but if Shiro was grooming you to be him then _why aren’t you any good at it_?”

Hunk tried not to groan pitifully into his headset.  Sure, a week ago he’d been feeling about the same.  It had been tough to see what Shiro saw in Keith.  Well, not _that_ tough obviously, because he’d gotten over it when he remembered how he and Keith kicked ass in the Weblum.  Yeah, Keith had some pretty glaring short-comings, but he was doing his best just like the rest of them.  All he needed was some patience, some time to properly work through his grief.

For the most part, Lance knew that.  Hunk _knew that he knew_.  The outburst was just… stress.  And emotions running high.  And maybe, a little bit, the fact that Keith had just launched Black directly at the Galra ship, driving her jaws through the outer shell so she could stick her entire head in.  There was the unmistakable sound of a bayard activating.

“Inside,” Keith said, as if everybody _hadn’t_ heard him primal screaming his frustration out by clobbering two sentries as he shot out of Black’s open mouth.  “I’m gonna grab Pidge’s thingy.  You can do whatever you want, just don’t let the ion cannon hit anything important.”

Lance groaned.  Pidge sighed.  Hunk spent a moment repeating the mantra _it’s only till we find Shiro it’s only till the team is back to normal_ to soothe himself.  He picked up speed again to literally cover Black’s butt. 

The ‘thingy’ was Pidge’s latest hack-bomb test.  It was actually a pretty cool concept, and Hunk was eager to see it in action.  It was, essentially, a mini-virus in the form of a robotic AI.  A problem-solving intelligence encased in a mechanical shell that was designed to dig into the mainframe and eat its way into the ship’s databases.  Pidge had programmed the thing herself; Hunk provided the casing, along with the heart made of Galra crystal shards that produced enough power to generate a hologram of any hand, eye, face, or buttcheek needed to unlock any door on the ship.  If everything went well, the ‘bomb’ would fish for information and let them remotely gather all the intel they needed _totally undetected_ by the Galra.  They could send one down onto any Empire-infested planet and learn everything they could ever want to know without risking lives in the process.  Then they could burst in, guns blazing, and scare the dang purple furries right off.  It was the coolest thing Pidge had proposed since two-on-two dance-off battles instead of running laps.

The arguing was really putting a damper on the whole thing, though.  Oh, and also the part where hack-bomb test number two was a complete and dismal failure, having been neutralized by ion radiation from the cannon on its way in.  They had a lot of tweaking to do.  After they got Keith the hell out of the ship, anyway.

“Paladin!” Allura shouted into her headset, dragging Blue around in a slow arc.  “Get back to your lion!  What do you think you are doing?!”

He didn’t respond.  That was par for the course.  For an hour or so at the beginning of the battle he’d been doing really well, calling out recommendations for positions and steering enemies away to give Pidge room to drop the hack-bomb.  Six hours against one battle cruiser was enough to kill _that_ mood.

“Keith, please just hurry.  Yellow isn’t good with precision and I don’t want to accidentally blast you,” Hunk begged as Red swept past, trying to keep all the fighters occupied.

At least he received a grunt in response.  Well, he thought it was in response.  He wasn’t so sure a moment later when Keith started cursing.

“Uh… you good there, buddy?” Hunk asked, fighting the urge to wheel Yellow around and tug anxiously on Black’s tail.

Finally, words.  “Found a Druid.”

And… that was it.  “Well I _guess_ that explains why their shield was so strong,” Lance muttered, after another long moment of silence.  Keith was panting, obviously choosing to run instead of having a face-off with a cloud of angry smoke wrapped in a Halloween shroud.  A smart move—Hunk would complement him if Lance wouldn’t immediately twist it into an insult.  He was really in a mood.  “I _told_ you guys something was up,” he was saying now, gunning for the front of the ship to rip up the tractor beam that kept trying to suck Allura in.  He missed.

“We _know_ ,” Pidge groaned.  She was pressing against the ion cannon, trying to redirect it, but Green was too small to do it on her own.  Hunk kept trying to get to her to help, but every time he started moving the fighters would descend and shoot at Black and he’d have to duck back down.  It was getting annoying.  Everything was annoying.  The stupid fighters, the stupid tractor beam, the stupid ion cannon… stupid cute little _penguin people_ …

And then Keith _screamed_.

“ _Quiznak_!” Lance swore, diving at the cruiser.  Keith’s comms crackled as he screamed again, obviously a side-effect of the Druid magic he’d failed to dodge in time.  Hunk’s heart surged up his throat, his mouth dry as cotton as he watched Red zoom in and punch a second crater in the hull to yank their once-red paladin out.  Allura swung clumsily at their six, guarding both their lions as she forced Blue into unleashing enough ice to split up the cluster of fighters.  It was a good thing that Lance had pulled away from the cruiser and was now occupied with tearing Keith a new one, Hunk thought with a wince, as she chastised the Blue Lion harshly.  This really, really needed to be over.  It took an eternity too long for Lance to give Keith a quick pat-down, grunt that he was fine to keep fighting, and release him to jet-pack back to Black.  With yet another cutting remark.

Hunk angled Yellow to the side, listing foods that started with P just to keep his mind off of Lance’s acerbic voice on the comm link.  Hunk loved him, he really really did, but there existed a switch in most people’s brains that told them when to stop focusing on something because it wasn’t doing any good.  Lance did NOT have that switch.  Especially when it came to knowing what would be good for himself.

For instance, it would be good for him to stop eating cookie dough before he gave himself a stomach ache.  Or, similarly, it would be good for him to let go of the idea that flirting with every girl or girl-coded alien he saw was an effective way to neutralize his internalized homophobia.  Y’know.  Things like that.

It was in an act of kindness that Hunk said, “Dude… just stop.”

“Hunk, please don’t ‘ _dude, just stop_ ’ me.  ESPECIALLY when you’re seeing the same things I am!  Like, your eyes aren’t closed, right?  You can see how stupid that was, right?”

“Lance, he’s tired.  We’re all tired.  _I’m_ tired.  Leave it be,” came Pidge’s weary voice.

“How am I supposed to do that when he’s—"

“Exactly how long is this going to keep up?” Keith asked sharply from Black’s cockpit, cutting across him.  He sounded somehow even less happy than he had when he was giving monosyllabic answers, his voice betraying how close he was to imminent explosion.

“Uh, how about until you admit that you actually have flaws that Shiro refused to see?”

The way no one spoke after that was telling.  Too far.  Even Lance must have been able to feel it, because suddenly Red’s radio line went silent.  Blasts that had previously been punctuation marks in the conversation turned into a stuttering staccato bouncing off the newly formed debris around the cruiser.  Hunk could feel his lungs deflating just a little more under the barometric pressure of grief.  The very same grief that permeated their bonds and shook them apart every time they tried to form Voltron.  Keith was the best option for piloting the Black Lion right now, but that didn’t mean anybody felt good about watching him and Black and their hollow, almost single-minded need to rip apart anything of Zarkon’s former empire that they could get their shared claws in.

Truth was, Hunk was a little worried that Keith was going to punch Lance right in the kisser if this kept going.  His fire hadn’t been so much a fire recently as it was a bubbling pool of lava—deep, roiling emotions that went nowhere, pumping up bubbles that were ready and willing to burst in the face of the first person who poked around too close. 

He switched to a private channel with Keith.  “Are you okay, buddy?” he asked.  In response, a grunt.  A moment of silence as he finally, _finally_ smashed through the ion cannon.  Hunk blew some air from his nose, squinting through the detritus.  The battle was nearly over now, thank god.  He turned his attention back to Keith’s tense face.  “Uh, okay, well, that was a really bad hit?  The Druid, I mean.  Is that… are you… are you really good?”

“I’m fine.”

It was curt.  Not quite the strained tone he used with Lance, the tone that meant he was desperately trying to hold himself together before he lashed out, but it still caused a heavy silence to descend.  Everything was quiet as they used their jawblades to finish the work the Black Lion had started, finally able to tear the cruiser to pieces.

They were on their way back to the castle after handing a communicator over to the Zashona before anyone had the nerve to speak on the open channel.  And of course, it was Allura; Allura and her need to browbeat them into teamwork because that was all she knew how to do when the going got rough.  Hunk suspected it was because she did the same thing to herself to keep going every day.

“Keith, I think we need to have a talk about cooperation,” she said.  She was as tired as the rest of them, but she wasn’t going to get a proper debrief if she tried, so this was all she had.  Hunk could hear the plea in her voice.  “The Black Lion _cannot_ have a paladin that acts out every fleeting whim.  You’re struggling with her, I understand—we are all having unique issues with this adjustment.  But please—you must think before you undertake.”

Keith grit his teeth so hard that Hunk winced, hearing them grind over the comms.  No one else said a word.

“…You know you can talk to us about all this, right?” she asked, finally, when the tension was starting to make Hunk sweat in his already-sweaty suit.  “We can… we can help you with her, if need be.”

“Yeah, whatever, I’ll get right on that.”

“There is no need for the attitude,” Allura huffed.  Blue growled, as if in agreement. 

“…I know,” Keith said.  He pulled in a deep breath, his head hanging.  One gloved hand came up to cover his mouth before he whispered, “I’m sorry.  For today.”

And the day before.  And the day before that.  As a general rule, Keith was unapologetic in every action he undertook, but he was far from oblivious.  He knew how much strain his constant struggle was putting on everyone around him.

He knew, they knew, everyone knew.  There just wasn’t anything that they could do to fix it.

Lance visibly swallowed on the video feed, obviously feeling the guilt from his last jab about Shiro.  Pidge hunched up, looking away.  Allura sighed, her regal edges softening.  “Just get checked out by Coran when we get back,” she said to him, and closed her communications screen.

Back at the castle, everyone got out slowly, accommodating for worn-out muscles and achey heads.  They had planned to train that afternoon, but there was a unanimous agreement that the battle was more than enough for one day.  Instead, they waved half-heartedly as they split up, sick of looking at each other. 

Keith came out last, his armor covered in odd, sooty patterns that Hunk surmised were left behind by whatever magic he’d been hit with.  He was walking with one arm pressed against his stomach.  When he noticed the other boy waiting for him, he stared at Hunk with a pinched expression.

“I thought maybe I’d walk you down to the medbay?” Hunk said, reaching over automatically to take his elbow.  The dude looked like he wanted to lay down on the floor.  The gross, hadn’t-been-swept-in-god-knows-how-long-because-chores-were-secondary-to-defending-the-universe hangar floor.

He didn’t.  Instead, he blinked thoughtfully and said the last thing Hunk expected him to say, which was, “I’m _starving_ , though.”

It was no secret that Keith wasn’t really doing so great with sit-down meals right now, so Hunk was entirely unprepared for those to be the first words to come out of his mouth after such a disaster of a fight.  He was expecting something more along the lines of surly silence, really.  He blinked at Keith, taking him in from head to toe.  “Okay?  That’s great, and I’m glad you have an appetite, but Druid magic first aid comes first,” he said, frowning.

“Hunk, pleeease?”  Keith’s eyes found him, strangely bright.  Hunk frowned further, narrowing his eyes.  What was this?  Another of his jokes, which he only ever told when they were alone so that no one would believe Hunk when he repeated them?

Oh, wait.  He knew what it was.  “…You’re just going to get food and then go out there with Black again, aren’t you?” he asked, feeling exhausted in sympathy.  Keith really didn’t know when to quit—he was going to drive himself into the ground trying to take his new duties seriously.

But Keith shook his head, looking surprised.  “No.  I promise.  I’m actually just really hungry.  Wasn’t there something you wanted to try making?”

Well, shit.  If there was ever a thing that Hunk couldn’t refuse, it was that.  He did convince Keith to change out of his dirty armor before setting foot in the kitchen, however, and spent the whole walk there threatening to haul him over one shoulder and carry him straight to Coran if he tried to sneak away.

Keith let a small smile slip, swearing he would behave.  That was all Hunk needed—he deposited Keith in a chair at the table before he started to root around in the cabinets, some of his energy coming back.  Oh, man, he had just the thing!  There was this wicked good porridge thing with curds that tasted almost like tamale filling except without sour cream, and he’d had the idea to mix it with an Arusian grain right when they got called to their lions.  Add a little bit of a dried, ground Balmeran cave root (don’t knock it till you’ve tried it) and it would be _incredible_.

He paused in the middle of setting the ingredients down on the counter.  Keith had his head on his folded arms, his fingers tapping.  “Hey, you okay?” Hunk called over.

“Uh, yeah,” Keith said, distracted.  He raised his head, dragging his gloved hands across the surface of the table.  “Can you crave something you’ve never had before?”

“Uhhh… like what?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never had it.”  Keith pulled a face, rolling his shoulders.  The brightness of his eyes looked even stranger now, shimmering under the glowing light-strips running along the walls.  He might have been a little pale, but Hunk had a hard time judging with Keith’s face.  He was always pale.

Still, it warranted a little concern when his mouth turned down in discomfort.  “Dude, seriously, are you okay?  Because maybe you’re not okay, because that was a bad hit.  No judgment here.”

“Stop worrying, I just pulled something.  I’ll go ice it after this.”  He was kneading at the back of his neck now, his eyes slipping closed.

That did not make Hunk feel like worrying any less.  “Maybe some eggs would make you feel better.  I was hoarding some from that one star-system…” he muttered.  He turned to pop open a different cabinet, shivering as the cool air wafted out.

From the other side of the counter, Keith groaned.

Hunk popped his head up immediately.  “…You still good?”

He didn’t look good.  His face was now severely pinched, carved into a wince.  “Yeah, I…”  He trailed off as he stood, bracing both hands on the edge of the table to stretch out his back.

“Dude, what is it?” Hunk said, nervously standing up, ready to vault over the counter.  He _knew_ he should have taken Keith straight to Coran.

“It’s just… can you pull, like… bones?” Keith asked, with a puff of air that could have been a laugh if he wasn’t currently wincing like he’d just been hit across the spine with a weighted lead beam.

“Did you injure a disc?  That’s a pod-level injury,” Hunk said, tapping his fingers together.  He made a speedy decision, starting to pack the food away again.  “We should get you to Coran.”

“Yeah, sure…”  Keith straightened with a whimper.  His hands were shaking.  Hunk could have _sworn_ his face was actively losing color now—he swayed a little, taking a half-step away from the table.  Hunk started around the edge of the counter, coming to meet him.

Before he even got close, Keith folded with a cry, his head smacking the edge of the table.

“Oh!  Oh god!  What is it?  Hey, Keith!  Buddy!  Talk to me!”  Hunk swung around, his shoes losing traction on the floor as he scrambled to kneel next to the downed paladin.  Keith only groaned, curling up on his side.  In seconds he was moving again, his spine arching urgently, rolling him onto his back.  He pushed against the floor, scratching it with clawed hands, his head snapping back.  A high whine squeezed from his throat, his face scrunched in pain. 

Panicking, Hunk flapped his hands in the air between them, unsure where to grab but seized with the desperate urge to pick Keith up and sprint to the medbay.  He gingerly took him by the elbow, but Keith was already rolling again, now facing away with his cheek pressed to the floor.  He curled up on that side, pinning his head between his arms.  The sound he let out was just short of a wail, turning into words halfway through.  “ _Aaauuuuuuhhh_ fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, ow ow ow, it _huuurts_ …”

Hunk couldn’t take this.  He bolted to his feet, hands wringing and ready to take the hallways at a dead sprint, and blurted, “ _I’m gonna go get Coran_.”

He was stopped by Keith’s face turning to him, all wide pleading eyes with pupils that were constricted down to pinpricks.  He tried to push himself up on one elbow and couldn’t—his breaths were coming in swooping gasps as he locked eyes with Hunk.  “Don’t… don’t leave me down here.”

Hunk swallowed.  “Are you sure?”

Keith nodded, all his movements short and stunted.  He uncurled a little, scooping air into his lungs like it was a chore.  His face was bloodless, sweat breaking out across his skin, but he had on an expression that he normally reserved for battling Galra—fierce, determined, unwilling to back down.  “Just… get me… up to a chair or something, I don’t want to be on the floor,” he said weakly, starting to push upward again and not giving Hunk a say in the matter.

It was a mess.  No matter how gently Hunk placed his hands, he could feel Keith wincing under him.  His back seemed to be the worst, bringing out some awful noises when Hunk tried to grasp him around the waist.  He finally got both his hands under Keith’s armpits and began to lift, causing another almost-wail that cut him to the bone. 

Hunk squeezed his eyes closed, aware that he was going to start crying even though he wasn’t the one in inhuman amounts of pain.  He could do this— _Hunk, you can DO THIS_.  He had to help his friend.  He clenched his jaw and kept going.  Scrambling, the two of them held on to each other, Keith’s hands weak and his head hanging at an angle that looked painful.  Hunk had a good grip on him now, but he was shaking too hard to get his feet under him.  Hunk almost wanted to just lower him back down and tell him not to move, but his face was so determined that Hunk swallowed his trepidation and kept going.

Keith’s mouth was pressed into a line right up until the moment that he collapsed into the chair—then he leaned forward, opened it, and up came everything in his stomach.  Hunk gasped and jittered away, leaving him to paw at the edge of the table with fingers that looked like they were locked in place.  “Dude…?”

Keith gulped air, his head dangling.  His feet were tangled up in each other, his shirt was twisted across his chest, his entire body was shivering with long, slow tremors, and beads of sweat were now starting to roll down his face.  He did _not_ look good.  “Might have been… a mistake…” he managed to gasp.

Hunk swallowed down his own vomit several times before he could respond.  “Not to be that asshole,”  he said, breathing through his mouth, “but I’m pretty sure everything you do can be categorized that way.”  He was trying for a little humor, to wipe away the way his throat was clenching in sympathy, but at this point jokes weren’t doing anything for either of them.  Well, either that or the joke wasn’t funny, but he was pretty sure that even then Keith would try to give him a smile, just to make sure he wasn’t panicking too hard to go get help.  Keith was good like that—checking in to see if his anxiety was under control when they were out on difficult missions and stuff.

Right now, though… with a low moan, Keith let himself slump sideways until he was leaning on the table, one arm lying limp above his head and his cheek gingerly resting on the cool surface.  He continued to take measured breaths, his eyes falling closed in concentration.

“Okay,” Hunk whispered, starting to back up.  “Okay.  I’m going to run and grab Coran, okay?  Just… just stay as still as you can.”

Then he turned and sprinted.

 

***


	2. In Which Keith Learns the Art of Metaphor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes you're having the worst day of your life and someone shoots you in the back with a Nerf dart, because of course he did.
> 
> ...Damnit, Lance.

Keith wasn’t really sure what happened before the pain rocketed up his spine and crashed into his skull.  He must have been doing something, right?  Accidentally dropped a building on himself?  Pain like that didn’t just _exist_ , right?

Or maybe it did.  Maybe this was just his life now.  People usually had words to describe their pain—he’d heard it a thousand times.  Blinding pain, searing pain, pain like the razored edges of a thousand boar tusks goring you in the intestines.  The pain he was in now… he’d never felt anything like it.  He couldn’t _imagine_ anything like it.  It kept him in the moment because he couldn’t escape it, but there was some fundamental piece of him that just couldn’t process what was happening, leaving him to reel like an overtired toddler.  Around and around his consciousness went, a sway here and a wobble there, time getting strange as he struggled to just contain everything he was feeling.  He distantly wondered if he was on his way to passing out, but he couldn’t afford the thought any room in his brain because there WAS no room.  He existed between the grip of horrendous pain and oblivion, squeezed in the middle like they were two halves of a vice—the balance of the two almost made it okay, except nothing was okay, not the awful pain and not the waves of dizziness.  Certainly not the way he could feel the edges of his bones, every single one of them, grinding together.  But he could stay the way he was, mostly taken up by the pain, because with the little bit of processing power left to him he could focus, intently, on just breathing each second away.

He was doing okay like that until Lance made his appearance.

The first words Lance spoke were too low for him to understand.  He was too far away, and Keith could barely even grasp the fact that he existed on the mortal plane, let alone that communication was happening.  He raised his head just an inch, trying to get any hold on the situation at all.  His vertebrae were too big, weighty, scraping against each other.  If he had to compare them to something, they would be blocks of heavy, pressurized iron.  It wasn’t unbearable, at least.  He could handle this. 

Except… who was he kidding?  The next words Lance spoke were drilled into his aching head, a gleeful shout of, “AND HE SHOOTS!” that was followed by a plastic-on-plastic click and then _agony_. 

Keith wasn’t sure what kind of noise he made, but there was a clatter behind him.  He didn’t have time to get to know the vocalization because immediately on its heels came his stomach and that wasn’t happening.  Gritting his aching teeth, he swallowed and swallowed, trying to combat the way that his shoulder blade was now a literal burning coal in his back that was sending sickening heatwaves all the way to his knees.  It throbbed, his stomach lurched, he swallowed it back, but it wasn’t stopping, it hurt, it hurt so bad—

“Whoa, man, chillax.  It was a nerf dart!  Got ‘em from that weird place at the mall.”  Lance was leaning down to pick up the gun, his voice muffled, when Keith lost the battle.  The vomit splattered the table, and a moment later he heard it hit the floor.  He could no longer make out Lance—the ringing in his ears was too bad.  His entire body trembled, out of balance—he heaved again.  Cold fingers pressed against the back of his neck, against the icy-hot knobs of his spine, and he heaved again.  He _breathed_ , and he heaved again.  There was nothing left to come up, but his stomach tried, and now with each heave he felt like his internal organs were slamming into the bottom of his ribcage.  He had to stop, but there was nothing he could do.  It felt like his ribs were breaking inside of him.  No, scratch that, he was pretty damn sure they were.  The little ones in the back could only be in splinters.  He gasped in air and they pinched the sheath of muscle around them, slicing like thousands of teeny knives.  He couldn’t stand much more of this.  He HAD to stop.  He had to…

The dizziness surfaced again, and he was ready for it to take him.  His head swam, rolling limply.  He was probably face-first in vomit but the thought couldn’t even cross his mind, it was so crowded with pain and things related to pain.  He was ready to be unconscious, he wanted to go, why wasn’t he _there yet_ —

Lance.  “…shhh, okay, okay, come on now, it’s okay, please stop making that noise, oh god…”

The words weren’t doing much, but they were accompanied by the faintest touch.  Not his hands, thank god—something much lighter, much softer, that dripped cold water down the skin of his jaw and neck.  It wasn’t anywhere near heavy enough to touch his bones, unlike everything else that had come into contact with him in the last… god, how long had it been?  It felt like hours.  The temperature was so pleasant… he suspected it was probably not all that comfortable, but compared to his body right now, anything felt agreeable.  From inside out, his hitching throat slowly calmed.  That was good.  Finally, he could keep track of his air, keep the slow sips coming in and out in a way that hurt a little less.

“Oh, thank the lord,” Lance whispered, his breath ghosting over Keith’s wet skin and causing tingles.  “Okay, Lance, what do you do now?  You gotta… you gotta call Coran.  Oh god, I wish Shiro were here… Keith, buddy, if you can hear me, I need you to hold on.  I’m gonna get Coran.  Just… please, okay?”

Didn’t someone already…?  Unsure if his voice would work properly, Keith slowly opened his lips.  They were hot and sticky and he didn’t want to think about why, but they moved easily enough.  He breathed out, not really a word, but it caught Lance’s attention.

“Keith?  Hey, bud, I can’t touch you right now, but I’m here.  I’m here,” he said, and his voice cracked just slightly.  “I know it hurts, please don’t try to talk.  And trust me, if anyone can help it’s Coran.”

The tiniest twinge of annoyance flitted across Keith’s mind.  Why would he waste air trying to talk about how much pain he was in?  That was a surefire way to start throwing up again, and he didn’t want that.  He had to… he needed to…

“What was that?” Lance asked, and his voice was pitched more and more towards panic the longer he spoke.

Keith tried again.  He was aiming for five syllables, but if he managed even two he figured that would be enough.  The back of his throat clicked—there was liquid lodged back there, but it wasn’t a concern at the moment.  His tongue moved ponderously.

“Hunk?” Lance asked.  “Did you say Hunk?  Thank the frickin’ stars, was he here?  Does he know?”

Syllable two.  _Here we go, Keith_ , he coached himself.  His jaw felt like it was broken in a hundred places, but he pushed past it.   _Just do it, just get it out_. 

“Wuh… went?  Hunk went?  Where?”

Apparently, two wasn’t enough.  Figured.  Keith geared up to get his face organized again.  _Screw five syllables_ , he growled in his head.  Why was this so hard?

He was almost through Coran’s name when Pidge arrived.  He almost tensed, ready for some new torture, but she already seemed on alert.  “Coran is on his way, what the fuck happened?” she asked, and he knew her eyes were sweeping the scene.

“I don’t know,” Lance babbled instantly.  “I walked in and—well I hit him with—it doesn’t matter, I fucked up and he screamed, Pidge, except it was worse than a scream and then he started hurling and I—“

Hunk burst back in, the Altean advisor in question right on his heels.  Lance jerked up onto his feet, and Keith finally let himself go completely limp again.  An adult was here.  A real adult.  Thank god.  A quickfire conversation began above his head.  It slipped right past him.  He was exhausted.  The weight of his own body felt like it was slowly crushing his skeleton.  Had every bone inside of him been scratched up and whittled down into splinters with a dull knife?  Very possible.  He couldn’t imagine feeling worse than he did right now.

Someone peeled away the wet cloth that was draped over his neck, and he couldn’t help but mewl.  It wasn’t long before another replaced it, tucked so gently behind his aching jaw.  A second one was placed on the arm that was splayed over the table.  They helped, so much… he whined, the sound coming from deep in his chest.  He wanted them to know, to keep doing that. 

“Hey,” someone said, and he found that his head was clear enough to open his eyes and really focus them for the first time.  There was Hunk, his headband lopsided and his eyes huge.  He was trying to get a smile to stick, but every time his eyes flickered somewhere new on Keith’s person it wobbled a little bit more.  “Good to see you’re still with us.  Can you tell Coran what’s going on?”

That… no.  That was too much.  He tried to take a step back, to look at it from a distance so that he could give it words, and… his vision went wonky, this time from tears.  Too much, he couldn’t.  The words didn’t _exist_.  How could he explain this?

Coran was hovering over him with some strange instrument, moving like he was on a balance beam.  He didn’t seem to know what to do, either, when Hunk looked at him desperately.  His mustache quivered for a moment as his eyes went wide, letting out an, “Uh… hmmm.”  It was Pidge who came to the rescue. 

“Hunk, back off a second.”  He gave her his spot and went to hover anxiously in the background.  Keith couldn’t see much, now, but he heard Pidge as she carefully braced her small feet on either side of the vomit puddle to lean in close.  “You feel up to answering yes or no questions?  You can just make a little noise either way.” 

Yeah, he could… he hummed a little, hoping that would be enough.

Pidge nodded.  “Okay.  First question.  Is the towel on your neck making you feel better?”

God, now the tears were coming faster.  If he wasn’t careful, he was going to start sobbing, and that sounded bad.  He made another noise of affirmation.

“Hunk, Lance, see if you can find anything else to put on him,” Pidge called softly.  Coran gave some swift instructions on where the dispenser was, but other than that he still just observed.  “Okay,” Pidge said.  She was working very hard to keep her voice as soothing as possible, something she normally didn’t care to do.  “Second question.  Are you feeling anything else besides pain?”

He tried to get his thoughts together, but he failed.  He was drifting, a little.  She was starting to get hard to focus on. 

“Keith.  Do you need me to make the question easier?”

“…Nausea,” Lance supplied after a pause.  He was running the water, and when he spoke again he was getting closer.  He gently laid another towel on Keith’s back, and his trembling fingers grazed burning skin.  “I think it was because of the pain because he only started to throw up after I nerfed him.  There was blood in the vomit, but not enough to be coming from his stomach.  Maybe his gums?  And I’m willing to bet he’s got a fever, he was… is… hot to the touch.”

“He said he was hungry,” Hunk said slowly.  “Like, he was craving something.  Before it got bad.  He didn’t know what, though.”

Keith finally found his voice.  God, those towels felt good.  “’m dizzy,” he said, and though it was slurred to hell and back, the grin that lit up Pidge’s face was beautiful.

“Can you feel anything else?”

“Nnno…”

“Okay.  Third question.  Did the pain come first?”

“Mmhm.”

“And you feel it everywhere?”

“…Mmm.”

“Is it… hmm, how do I phrase this?  This feels like twenty questions.  Is the pain… sharp?”

“Mmhm.”

“Is it worse in certain places?”

“…’m bones?”

They kept going like that for a little bit, the boys slowly cooling him down with wet towels while Pidge questioned and Coran danced around, just out of sight.  Finally, he seemed to finish with whatever tests he was doing and came up behind Pidge, putting his hand on her shoulder.  “Okay,” he said softly.  “I think I know what’s going on.”

“Well?” Lance asked.  All the slow back and forth was obviously killing him.  He was on the far side of impatient, now that the panic was wearing off.  Keith wished he could experience impatience.  Anything would be better than this.

Everyone leaned in close to hear.  “Your bone density is changing.  Normally you humans are light and airy, like the kwiffs of the high hills.  Something’s set off a heckova change inside of you.”  The Altean stroked his mustache, looking down not unkindly.  “I’d have to run some further tests, but I’m also willing to bet that the uh… what was it you humans had in your bones?  Calcium?  I’d bet the calcium is being replaced by some other compound, which was probably what you were craving before it hit.  I’d like to get you to the infirmary right quick, just to make sure.”

That was… well, it wasn’t a relief, exactly, but Keith felt slightly better knowing that someone had an idea of what was going on.  He stirred a little bit, bending his fingers at minute angles just to get a feel for them again.  This was… this was okay.  It didn’t feel so bad right now, even if he was drained and aching and could barely form a coherent thought.  He cleared his throat a teeny bit.  “Yeah,” he said, his voice hoarse.  “Sounds… good.”

“Right!” Coran said cheerfully.  “Up you get, then!”

“Uh… I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Hunk warned.  Keith wasn’t so much ignoring him as he just didn’t have enough brain matter to pay attention.  His ears were still ringing, the sound coming and going, on the edge of painful.  So long as nothing felt like it was actively being crushed in an industrial shredder, though, he figured that now was as good a time as ever to get it over with.  He didn’t know how much longer he could stand this without blacking the hell out.

It was with the utmost care that he slowly picked up his upper body from the surface of the table, coaxed on by Coran’s cheery voice.  His head swam, his joints pinged, his ears rang, but he managed to sit up without turning inside out.  Four pairs of hands were outstretched as he righted himself, seemingly ready to catch him.

Maybe the worst was over.  Maybe all of the big bones in his legs and back had already changed to whatever they were changing to and from here it would be tolerable.  God… god did he hope so.

Everyone seemed to be staring at him, thinking the exact same things.  He could only blink hazily back.

“I’m gonna take your arm,” Lance said, finally, taking the plunge.  Keith gave the smallest nod.  Permission.  It still hurt, and bad, when Lance’s hands cupped his upper arm, holding on, but it didn’t feel like it was ripping him apart anymore.  Coran took his other side, and Hunk scooted around to support him from the back, and with all three of them helping he was able to stand on his own two, aching feet.  Pidge ducked around, adjusting towels and spreading another one across his throbbing forehead.  It was almost good, and Keith nearly laughed, before they guided him forward to take a step and his entire body lit up like a piece of kindling.

“Wait,” he said, panicking, but he couldn’t speak above a whisper because _something was wrong_.  Not like all the other things that were wrong—this one was small, too small to be so bright, so hot, burning him from the inside out.  It snatched all his focus away from the rest of his body, it was so intense.  How could something so minuscule demand so much attention?

The ringing.  It was getting worse.  It took him a moment to figure out why, and by then it was starting to get so much more than painful.  There were bones in your ears, little tiny ones—and it seemed that every bone in his body had a mandatory ticket to the joy of being stripped of nutrients, reorganized molecule by molecule, and built up again from scratch.  One moment he was just feeling a little off-balance and the next it was like something long, metal, and covered in rust was being shoved through one ear and out the other.  Not only that, but his insides were doing strange things—heat seemed to emanate from his stomach, twisting up and through the rest of his digestive system.  It was nothing like the nausea and everything like the first cramps that had set into his bones before everything went to shit.  His fingers dug into the shirts of the two figures at his elbows.  The pain in his phalanges was like a raindrop falling hopelessly against the rushing waves starting to hit his head.  He needed to tell them—he had to let them know so that they could _help him_ —but the world suddenly tipped.  His feet went out from under him.  He thought he was falling but making sense of directions wasn’t currently within his capabilities. 

Pain arched from one side of his skull to the other, reverberating in his cerebral cavity.  It was the pain of an earache but on a scale of one to ten, it was hovering near one thousand.  He thought his ears were going to explode.  The pain was so bad that his vision went dark, and his hands went numb, and he was distantly aware that he’d curled up so tight that his spine was SCREAMING but the driving pain in his head was too much, he couldn’t do it, oh god he couldn’t do it, it hurt, he couldn’t hold on like this—

Finally, he felt consciousness slipping away like it had threated so many times already.  He jerked, and his lungs let go in a gasp against a whirl of pure dizziness, and then suddenly he was dead to the world.  His body slumped, graceless.

It was only a small relief.

 

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's tomorrow already, right? Lmfao.
> 
> I'm just going to set the rest of the chapters to go up whenever they want to (idk if you set a specific date do they go live at midnight?) so cheers!


	3. In Which Pidge is the Worst Dictionary Ever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith is out and the stakes go up. Pidge gets sent on an errand and discovers state secrets.
> 
> Go, be great, Pidge!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please just pretend that the science makes sense, I don't want to do hardcore physics/biology homework right now.

Everything was yelling.  Pidge tried her hardest to sort it out, to keep tabs on the most important pieces so that they wouldn’t be lost in the chaos, but until Keith went under it was a shit show.  Hands were flailing all over.  Keith’s elbows stabbed like shanks as he clawed at the sides of his head.  It was all they could do to hold onto him. 

Then, of course, Keith went under and the stunning silence in the wake of his screaming froze all of them for a good few seconds.  Pidge stood rooted to the spot, staring at Keith’s awful white face as Coran, the only one who seemed to have any wits about him, lowered the boy gently to the floor.  Hunk, hands hanging uselessly, just gaped.  Lance had his palms clamped over his own ears, shirt disheveled and stretched.  Pidge looked down at herself—she was holding onto one of the wet towels like her life depended on it.  The three of them traded looks, passing emotion after emotion in a tight little loop, trying to find one that fit the scope of the situation.

“He’s got circulatory fluid coming from his ears,” Coran noted, kneeling at Keith’s head, and even his ever-present cheer seemed to have dimmed.  Pidge glanced down.  He was right—there was red dripping down Keith’s jaw, stemming from his ear.  His lips, too, were red—Lance had been right, his gums were bleeding.  Bleeding a lot.

“Blood.  We call that blood,” Pidge said, and the spell was broken.

Lance’s chest began to heave.  “What is _happening_?” he shrieked, dancing back from Keith’s prone figure.  He nearly tripped over Keith’s chair, managed to scramble over it, and was taking a lap around the room by the time that Hunk found his voice.

“Is he… what… what can we do?” he asked, shaky. 

Coran’s face was etched with lines, more than they had ever seen before, as he thought hard.  “Pidge,” he said, and his voice held the muted purpose of a commander stepping up.  He could have been scary, she thought vacantly, as the King’s Advisor.  “Go to Allura.  Tell her to turn down the general gravity by, oh… thirty-seven percent.  Once there’s less chance of another drop like that, we’re going to move him to the med bay.  Help her finish up the last of the calculations she’s doing and then meet us there.”

Pidge nodded and started walking.  She wasn’t sure where her feet were, per se, but she was moving and that was good.  Thirty-seven percent.  She was still clutching the wet towel.  Interesting.  Thirty-seven.  The sounds of Lance panicking and Hunk crying started to fade into the background.  Why thirty-seven?  There must be a reason.

By the time she reached the command center, Pidge’s mind had cleared up considerably.  She figured she was a little bit in shock—her body was reacting to an unknown danger, which had slowed down her conscious thought process for a few minutes there.  The number, though—thirty-seven was such a specific number that her mind had latched onto it, tumbling clumsily over it in an attempt to understand until it had finally clicked.  Thirty-seven percent lowered gravity was perfect for transport because Keith wouldn’t be hurt if he fell, but Lance, Hunk, and Coran could still move about the castle with some amount of ease.  Pidge herself might be left having to use wall holds to keep up, but she had a separate task, allowing them to move at a good pace.  That plan would allow her to take some time to gather Allura and dive into some research at the bridge so they could start getting an idea of what to do.  She smiled.  She had to give it to Coran—that was quick thinking.

Allura was curled in a chair when she arrived, rubbing her temple and making a face at the mouse gesticulating from the armrest, but she sprang up the moment the door opened.  She was wearing a simpler dress than her usual one—just a slip of floor-length blue with a few frills around the cuffs and a line of embroidery about the collar.  “Right, Coran, the last of the navigation tweaks are almost complete—that shimmy was quite the doozy, but I think I’ve got it—“

“I’m sorry, Princess, but it’s just me.”  Pidge came up beside her, instantly reaching for a screen to draw up video of the kitchen and the intercom from here to there.  “I’m sure Hunk babbled all over the place when he was running around trying to find Coran, so I’ll just give you some pertinent details.  Keith is… bad.  Some serious changes are happening inside him and he lost consciousness a few minutes ago.  We’ll need to turn down the gen gravit field for a few minutes so that they can take him to the med bay.”

Allura frowned at the screen.  “'Bad' as in 'possibly fatal'?  We don't have the personnel here to deal with anything beyond what can be cured by a pod, and certain types of magic add ah, what was the English word you use?"

"Contraindications."

"Yes, those.  Did Coran suggest that we send for any outside help?” Allura asked as she typed in the command to bring up the gravity controls.

"He didn't seem _quite_ that concerned, but he also didn't seem like he really knew what was going on, either."  Nor did anyone else, but Pidge didn't mention that part.  She took note of the control command, storing it away for later, and fiddled with the slider for a moment until she’d solidified the conversion from Altean to English.  She felt her heels lift off the floor—beside her, Allura’s hair seemed to expand several sizes. 

"It might be a good idea to look for someone more experienced with Druids," Allura murmured, almost as if to herself.  "I'll send a ping to the Olkari in case they have anyone in their database.  What kind of symptoms are we looking at, exactly?"

On the video feed on the small holoscreen, Coran had herded the boys into a pack around an emergency stretcher.  He stood with vigor and made a grand sweeping gesture, pointing off down the hall, to let everyone know that they were on the move.  Pidge focused her attention back on the conversation, letting the list of symptoms roll across her mind.  There was a pattern there that she hadn't unearthed yet—what did the chemical make-up of the skeletal system have to do with Druid magic? 

From the beginning, again.  What did they know?  “He’s in an incredible amount of pain, enough to cause vomiting and blackouts.  The cause seems to be his bone density, which is in flux.  Coran suggested that the base compound was changing from calcium to something else.  Secondary to that, he has a fever, dizziness, and Hunk insists that he was having food cravings just before the pain hit."

Allura dutifully typed up all the information, bringing up a long-range transmission to send it out.  They would likely have to wait a few vargas for a response, though.  They were a long way from Olkarion.  "I suppose all we can do for now is gather information," she sighed.

Pidge didn't really hear the words, she was so focused on running the list again.  There was something just slightly odd about the symptoms and their progression.  "I don't know why Druid magic would have this effect," she said, thoughtful.  "It's obviously incapacitated him, but I feel like there's more to it.  Like maybe this change has an end result that we can't see yet."  They didn’t have enough pieces.  They needed something… something that would make all of this make sense…

“We should get down there.  I’m too tired to focus on navigation right now, anyhow,” Allura sighed, worried.  She finished the standard encryption and set the message to transmit, leaning on her chair to let the mice scamper up her arm as she prepared to march them all to the medbay.

“Just… one second,” Pidge said, sliding into a seat.  Her bony bottom almost floated off.  “I’m going to do a few quick searches on the mainframe before we head over.”  She leaned forward until her nose was almost touching the screen.  Information rolled in front of her, lists that basically broke down the intra-network history of the archives.  The Alteans didn’t have any kind of backlog, for security reasons (or just because they used to have servants to record all that mundane stuff for them, no one was quite sure), but Pidge had long ago figured out a way around that.  It was too funny to NOT know the things the other paladins searched when they thought no one would see, and besides, the ship’s newly-imported-and-barely-translated catalogue of info packets was in desperate need of any kind of organizational system that made sense to a human. 

Two quick sentences punched into the command slot and the titles broke down, crunched through a sieve designed to pick up specific words. 

She had what could be considered a hunch, though she wasn’t fond of the word.  The things Coran had said, the little information she’d been able to gather from Keith, and her own knowledge of the Druids all fit together in a way that tickled at her memory.  She knew she’d seen something very similar before… right here, in fact.  Maybe back when Allura was first talking about the lions, or a little after that?  Something about the Galra.  Something that had made her a little sick to her stomach to see but had been quickly swept away by all the other crazy things that were constantly happening around here.  Now, what _was_ it?

“You’re looking for… what is that word?” Allura asked, pointing at one of the terms that Pidge had hastily punched in.

“Lycanthrope,” Pidge said, still scanning the results coming up.  “I don’t know what the space equivalent is, but on Earth there are legends everywhere about people who turn back and forth from animals, usually wolves.  Shapeshifters, I guess."  She paused to think a moment.  "Maybe shapeshifter would have been a smarter term to type in.  Let me add that one real quick, uh… there."  She adjusted her glasses, watching the data churn.  "I just figured it was worth a try, because what I’m looking for—“

A new holoscreen shot up, bumped from the swirling mass of data.  Pidge turned to that one, quickly picking through it.  She had just started scrolling when another screen popped up.  Then another.  Then, in a matter of seconds, the two of them were surrounded by pinging blue screens, clamoring for attention.

Allura squinted at one, reading aloud.  “Signs of genetic transmutation and post-procedural switching of gametes from recessive to dominant…  Is this what you were looking for?”

“No…” Pidge breathed, flicking back and forth between screens.  “This is… so much more.  Someone has been looking at information on Galra genetics research.  Look at this!”  She held up a scientific report, swinging it around and enlarging it so that the type was as large as her fingers. 

“But who…?” Allura asked, confused.  "Why is all of this…?"

Pidge wasn’t listening.  Most of these reports must have been from the medical files she pulled from the ships they boarded.  A lot of the intel they gathered was still unindexed and untranslated; she didn’t have the time to write up a program to determine which Galra dialect each file was in to run it through the proper translator, so when they needed info they did it manually, or sent it out to liberated colonies who could do the secretary work for them.  These, however, were already translated, the date marked as months ago.  Someone on the ship had purposefully put this stuff through the translator.  She squinted at the metadata of the search results, looking at when and where this stuff was acquired and who had opened it since.  Galra cruiser Alpha-7-8-Phi-9-0-2, Sendak's ship.  Access granted to:  _Shiro._

On a whim, she brought up a list of Shiro’s search history.  _Experimentation.  Genetic manipulation.  Medical, druids, quintessence._ Some of the queries were in Galran, symbols that she could guess he’d run into during his ‘stay’ with the Galra, bits of things he remembered and was trying to make sense of.  It painted a gruesome sort of picture.  Did he have some idea that this was something that could happen?  Had he seen it?  She almost didn’t want to know.

Beside her, Allura read slowly, plucking through the heavy jargon.  Pidge shoved aside screens to check up on the boys.  They were well on their way, being exceptionally careful—the end of the stretcher with Keith’s head was cradled in Lance’s arms, Hunk supporting his torso and keeping his limbs still, with Coran at the rear propping up the end with his legs.  The feed was too fuzzy to get a good look at any of their faces. 

Pidge gently prodded the intercom button, watching Allura’s eyebrows dance on her face, moving between anger, concern, confusion, and back again.  “Hey, Coran?” Pidge said, speaking quietly so as to not startle them.

“What is it, Number Five?” Coran asked, voice strained.  Harsh pants could be heard over the airwaves—they could only be Keith.

“This is…”  Allura looked up, her eyes huge, flicking from the file to Pidge to the video screen.  “This cannot be real.  This is… madness.  There is no being in this universe sick enough to try this.”

Pidge locked eyes with her.  “Coran, is there a word in your language that translates to eugenics?”

Hunk looked slowly over his shoulder at the nearest camera, the fear evident even on his small, fuzzy face. 

“No, I’m afraid I’ve not the slightest inkling what you mean,” Coran said.  They laboriously turned a corner, coming into the hallway with the medbay.

“It’s a term that basically means ‘the science of producing desirable traits in humans’,” Pidge said.

“Except desirable means different things to different people,” Lance muttered, just loudly enough to be heard over the communications line.  Coran glanced over, seemingly confused.

“The Nazis—these really evil humans—were known for killing whole groups of people in order to purify the human race,” Hunk explained, his face darkening.  “Purify meaning, like, kill off the people they didn't think were worthy of life.  Millions of people died.  There was a world war about it."

"Ah.  This happened relatively recently, did it?" Coran asked.

Lance shuddered.  "Yeah.  Well, they weren't the only ones, but they were some of the worst.  They caused something called the Holocaust, which happened like a hundred and seventy years ago.  If you ever wonder why I call Zarkon Space-Hitler, well.  He was their leader."

"I see," Allura said, breathing out.

"Though the Nazis couldn't have done anything like this," Hunk said.  "They didn’t really have the capability to do much except, y’know, some genocide and some horrible, aborted experiments involving stuff like, uh… forced infertility.  And stuff.”  There was a quiver in his voice like he wanted to cry, but he managed to take a deep breath and keep himself steady.  

Pidge could feel the flat, white dawn of understanding that hung over the Alteans as she cleared her throat, closing out all the holoscreens but the video feed and the report that Allura was facing.  “They didn’t have the know-how to actually alter DNA on a base level, is what we mean," she said, staring unseeing at the remaining holoscreen for a moment.  It was some kind of cruel irony, really, to get to the edge of their solar system only to find out that the dominant alien race was a bunch of genocidal purple dicks.  She could imagine the sour look on her dad's face when he found out.  It was almost funny, except the part where she always slipped a little too far when she thought about it, her mind conjuring up pictures of her dad in pain, quaking with fear.  She shook her head and continued, "We weren’t even space-faring people yet—we hadn’t gotten beyond our own atmosphere, after all, what did we really know about science?  Humans don't even have real magic.  We were pretty primitive compared to the Galra.”

“Number Five… what exactly are you edging around?” Coran said, his voice hushed.  It seemed to be thanks to Lance and Hunk that they were still keeping up a steady pace, edging closer to the med bay second by second.

Pidge bit the bullet, reading aloud: “ _’The half-Galra, no matter their appearance at birth, grows a gland unique to them that will activate during extreme stress.  This gland does not appear in full-blooded Galra, and will only sometimes appear in beings who are less than half-Galra.  When triggered, the gland releases a store of modified quintessence that targets different systems in the body, forcing a transmutation of the current dominant genetic structure, usually of the non-Galra genes, to be Galra-dominant._ ’”

Hunk swallowing was loud enough to be picked up by the mics.

“So they managed to code this into their DNA,” Coran mused darkly.  “Probably using druids.  Every Galra who breeds with another species will turn their offspring into a second generation, full-bodied Galra, lowering the numbers of native species and weakening them to further attack.”

Allura fumbled for her seat, sinking into it.  “I…”

“Forced assimilation, it must be a technique they developed to keep new conquests under their control,” Hunk said.  “You know, I kept _wondering_ how they could keep so much of space in line, because the Roman empire was nowhere near this large and it fell apart pretty spectacularly, like I don’t think we’ve had an empire on Earth last two thousand years let alone ten.  Ruling for an extended period of time is very improbable when you calculate how many of the ruling class you need to keep the peasant class in line because if you keep adding to the peasant class without simultaneously building up the ruling class the power dynamics will shift dramatically and the whole system gets unstable and the ruling class will inevitably be overthrown and really, it’s not like you can rely on robots all the ti-“

“What does this mean for Keith?” Lance asked, his icy voice cutting across Hunk’s babbling.  He was still steadily moving, looking back over his shoulder as he tucked the stretcher and Keith’s head close to his chest.  “Is he going to live through this?  Can they, like, mind control him?  Come on, Pidge, what other information is there?!”

“Give me a minute, Lance—as soon as you have him down, Allura and I are coming.  Just worry about getting him to a bed.”

“Not a pod?”

“I don’t really think a pod is going to help with this.”  The cryopods, Pidge had come to understand, paused unnecessary processes to direct all of a body's resources toward healing.  If these reports were right… and Keith was going through some sort of transmutation… then this was way beyond what a pod could handle.  

“…Roger,” Lance muttered, hearing what she didn't say, and Pidge turned off the intercom.  She stood, her fingers hovering over the gravity slider, ready to bump it up again and take off running.

“…Are humans really like that?” came a small voice.

Pidge turned.  Allura was staring at the medical file with a look of pure, unadulterated disgust.  Pidge lowered her chin, squared her shoulders, and tried to appear as far away from afraid as she possibly could.  All she felt, however, was like a scared little child, waiting for her dad to tell her everything was okay.  She wondered if Allura felt the same.

“Some of them, yes.  We’ve done some awful things.  Probably almost as bad as the Galra."  She bit her lip, thinking about the Star of David necklace she left behind when she became Pidge Gunderson.  "The thing is, though… there are always people who try their hardest to be good.  I know for certain that there were humans who fought tooth and nail against the Nazis.  And I think, just judging by how many Galra there are… there must be good Galra, too.  Not just the Blades, but… ordinary Galra who don’t sympathize with what the Empire is doing, or… or maybe don’t even know about it.”

Allura’s eyes hardened, taking on a new purpose.  “We must find them.  Or else… we must exterminate them.  All of them.  Atrocities like this are inexcusable.”

Pidge could only nod, not sure how she was feeling about that.  She wanted to stay strong, but she couldn't shake off that image of her father, watching his hope come crashing down at a strike of purple claws.  Extermination, even of the Galra, didn't feel like something that her father could be proud of.

Morality would have to be a concern for another time, however.  Right now, they needed focus.  Pidge grabbed the holoscreen and swept the data from it onto the small computer at her belt, ignoring the tag in the metadata at the bottom of the file that still had Shiro’s name in the ‘Access Granted To’ field, burning insistently.  It wasn’t time to wonder exactly how much the Black Paladin knew and how much he hid.  Right now, this instant, it was time to take care of Keith as best they could… and figure out something, _anything_ to do if they couldn’t.

 

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be honest, this story didn't start out this dark. Sometimes fascism comes to bite you in the ass, however, and you find yourself writing a story about space nazis and some fucked up things they did.
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> PS: turns out you can't queue updates like I thought which would have been cool, so I might just dump them all in the next day or so. Whoops.


	4. In Which Lance Has Some Regrets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nerf darts make for a very sad soundtrack for a life in space. Lance found this out the hard way. He just doesn't want to see Keith in pain anymore, man.
> 
> Seeing Keith's insides is really not much better, though.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As an aside, most of my headcanons for the kids exist in this fic. Like, Lance has ADHD in this and Pidge is trans. I'm not tagging some of them because they won't be relevant to the story and I don't need that many tags. It's just kind of implied that even if I don't say anything, this verse is still very much friendly to those headcanons.

The feathery fluff of Keith’s hair was in stark contrast to the oddly gritty blood that kept dripping into Lance’s hands.  His stomach felt light, but not in a good way—it felt like it was going to come up and out of him at any moment.  Maybe it was the lowered gravity.  Maybe it was all the talk about the Holocaust.  Maybe it was the blood grit.  Whatever it was, he swallowed and just tried to keep his hands steady, tried to stop thinking about the fact that any one of them could have been a target for the Nazis.  He and Hunk for their skin, Pidge and Keith for their gender identity, Pidge for her religion, any one of them for their sexuality… he felt sick.

“Steady does it,” Coran said, and Lance was grateful for the distraction.  “Status report—Number Two?”

“He’s shaking,” Hunk said in a low voice, curling his arm more securely under the stretcher, one big hand resting on Keith’s stomach and rubbing gently, soothing.  “I’ve got him, but Coran, I’m worried.”

“I know, Number Two.  Number three?”

Lance cleared his throat, testing to see if he was going to throw up or anything.  He guessed that he was safe for now.  “All good over here.  Lotta… lotta blood, but it seems to be coming from the same spots still.  Nothing new.”

“Excellent.  Just a few steps more, and…”

Together, the three of them lowered Keith onto a bed, collapsing the stretcher and gently arranging his limbs around him.  He made a small noise in the back of his throat, something like a gurgle, and Lance tipped his head to the side in case there was something lodged in there.  He felt Keith’s head loll on the bed-top as the gravity turned up again.

There were a few minutes of quiet, as Coran began to run a series of tests, examining the unconscious boy from the head down.  Hunk was quick to find some more towels, arranging them on Keith’s ashen face and neck and carefully pulling off his boots, his gloves, his belt.  Lance busied himself with the simplest thing he could think of—pillows.  Methodically he stole every pillow from the closet and tucked them around Keith’s body, trying his hardest to be gentle.  It felt… strange, and almost indifferent, to be treating Keith like this.  Not smiling, not goading him, just working around him in silence.  It felt wrong.

“Belly’s distended,” Coran said, taking notes with a modified Olkari cube.  The cube recorded each thing he said, repeating and reordering them as he went, keeping track of the most important ones.  “Do either of you know what kind of an instrument can see into the abdominal cavity?  My Altean instruments can’t differentiate your tissues, it seems.”

Hunk made a bewildered noise, now trying to work Keith’s pants off with his eyes closed to preserve his dignity.  “Not really my field, man.”

“…Try something with ultrasound,” Lance murmured, stroking Keith’s bangs back from his face.  Clammy sweat coated his skin, and it took a few tries to get all the strands going the same direction.  “That’s what they use to check on unborn babies.”

“Ultrasound, hm…” Coran said, moving to rifle through some cabinets.  The clangs and thuds of discarded instruments echoed around the room.  Keith moaned softly.

“So… do you think he has his binder on?” Hunk stage-whispered, pulling a sheet up to Keith’s waist. 

Lance swallowed, glancing down at the boy lying in front of him. “Uh… I hope not?”  He closed his eyes and crossed himself quickly before pulling the collar of Keith’s shirt to the side—no binder, just a ratty sports bra.  He nearly laughed in relief—there was _no way_ he was stripping an unconscious Mullet out of his binder without dying of embarrassment.

That was when footsteps sounded from down the hall.  A moment later, Pidge and Allura were bursting through the doors, out of breath.

“Tell me the plan,” Allura said immediately, crossing the room and taking control.  Pidge busied herself at the nearest console, opening a file to tear it apart for relevant information.  Coran finally found something that could work as a substitute for an ultrasound, holding it up triumphantly, and Hunk joined him to start fiddling with the settings.  The four of them began to talk back and forth, quick and precise, with varying amounts of jargon that Lance had no hope of understanding at that speed.  It was like they just fell into a familiar pattern, an array of understanding. 

That was good.  That was really good.  The only problem with that was that it left Lance once again out of the loop.  He couldn’t really do anything but stand awkwardly at Keith’s head, occasionally trying to soothe away the small noises he was making.  God, this was stupid.  What was he even doing? 

…At least it was better than what he’d been doing before all this.  Which was a depressing thought, but there it was.  Coming down from an adrenaline high, achy and alone, wandering around the halls looking for literally anybody for company, using the Nerf gun as an excuse to interact with another human/alien being with a half-formed idea that he could apologize to Keith about the battle by shooting him in the back with a Nerf dart… yeah, he wasn’t exactly proud of that.  And then the whole shooting at the kid who was in inhuman amounts of pain, well…

“Castle to Lance, do you read me?”

Lance looked up.  “Uh, what?”

“Come on, man,” Pidge sighed.  “Do you need me to explain it again?”

“I, uh… yeah, okay, maybe.  What did you say?”

“I said that the transformation seems to go in a specific order, moving from the systems that require the most quintessence to transform to the least.  Bones are first—I think it’s safe to say that those are all done.  They finished up with the small bones in his inner ears, which is why he passed out.  …Actually, now that I think about it, his teeth might come out?  I don’t know.  But next will probably be most of his internal organs, then muscles, then circulatory system, finishing up with skin.”

“How can you tell?” Lance asked, crouching next to Keith’s head.  The Nerf darts on his belt let out a sad little puff of air.  “Also, internal organs as in his brain, too?  Where are his nerves during all of this?  When do they go?  Oh god, does it do his spinal cord?  Will it paralyze him?”

“Does it look like I have answers?” Pidge demanded, but then Keith _moved,_ and Lance shushed her with as much tact as he could.

“Keith, hey, buddy.  Can you hear me?” Lance asked, hands hovering over the boy’s limp wrists.

Instantly, every face in the room was behind Lance, peering down from behind his shoulders.  Keith coughed, dislodging something thick and wet.  He made a few little pawing motions, and Lance took him by the arm, rolling him onto his side to cough it out.  It looked like… Lance swallowed, feeling the blood rush out of his own face.  It was a clot of something, too pink to be completely blood.  He hacked and wheezed for a few moments, and liquid slowly oozed out of his open mouth and onto the cot.  Lance gingerly pressed a hand against his back, moving it in slow circles when Keith didn’t cry out in pain.

“Okay… get it out… that’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen, but man, if it makes you feel better then just keep going, okay?”

Keith hiccupped a short little laugh, and Lance felt his own face split into a huge grin.

“Hey.  You back with us?”

“…Think so,” came the wavering voice.  He sounded utterly exhausted, but that didn’t stop him from letting out a horrible groan and curling up around his stomach.  “Oh fuck… hurts, god, it hurts…”

“Coran,” Pidge hissed, obviously trying not to get Keith’s attention.  Coran ducked his head, sliding over to her in what he probably thought was an inconspicuous manner. 

“What is it, Number Five?” Coran asked in a stage whisper.  Lance glanced over as Keith trembled, his knees folded up against his chest, absentmindedly tucking the pillows closer to Keith’s back as he eavesdropped.

“I found it.  I found what it does to the brain.  Look at this…”

“…It’s okay,” Lance said, going on autopilot for a moment as he tried to see what they were pouring over.  He distractedly rubbed Keith’s shoulder.  Was that a diagram?  An illustration?  Wow, who knew the Empire used visual aids in their scientific reports?

He was pulled back by the Princess’s strong hand on his shoulder.  “Keith.  I know it hurts,” she said, and the compassion in her voice was a beautiful thing to behold.  “We’re working on making it better.  Lance is here with you.  He’s going to keep you company while we figure this out.  Hunk, over here…”

The emotion that bloomed in Lance’s chest felt unreal.  He himself didn’t feel real.  The pride, the worry, the confusion, the bitterness and anger and pure relief that Keith was awake all just seemed to blend together in a sticky knot at the base of his chest.  He leaned over Keith and he could feel his shaking as if it was his own.  Maybe it was.  Maybe they were both shaking, together.

“Hey…” he said, just to try and keep them both grounded even as it felt like everything was slipping out from under him.  “Come on, kid, just breathe… take some deep breaths, focus on doing that…”

“S-sound like… Sh-Sh-Shiro,” Keith said through chattering teeth.  His gums were still bleeding, staining his mouth red, and he couldn’t quite manage a smile, but Lance grinned for the both of them.

“What?  No way.  Shiro would be more like…”  He cleared his throat, lowering his voice into a gruff, husky facsimile of their missing paladin.  “I’ve seen you in diapers, Keith, and this is not so bad.”

The breathy laugh he got was worth the various groans from around the room.

He took that moment to lean down, resting his chin on the pillow in front of Keith’s ashy face to look him right in the eye.  “You know… I say a lot of shit, but I really think that Shiro would be proud of you right now,” he whispered.  This was for Keith and Keith alone.  He picked the words carefully.  “He didn’t know what was going to happen, but I know for a fact that he’d be right here with you if he knew how bad you were hurting.” 

Regret and anxiety surged as he saw Keith’s adam’s apple bob, his eyes growing shiny.  “Oh,” Keith whispered back, like he hadn’t even considered it.  They were silent for a moment.  Keith’s eyes closed, his eyebrows twitching, and Lance could see him mouthing out the count of his breaths.  One, two, three, four.  One, two, three… he was shivering so hard that his lips could barely form the words.  Lance pressed a hand to his forehead—heat seemed to flow off of him.  Lance didn’t really have a mom-thermometer, but this seemed too hot.  Way, _way_ too hot.

“Hey, uh… anyone?” Lance asked the room at large.  “Is this fever something we should be worried about?”

“It’s at one-oh-seven of your Fahrenheit degrees if my conversions are right,” Coran piped up.  “Which, I’ve been informed, means he should be dead.  At this point, I have no frame of reference for you.”

“Well… I’m gonna get him a blanket, because he’s shivering.”

When no one told him not to, he left his post to snatch a few of the sheets from the supply closet.  He quickly passed Allura, who was pressing a strange little device to Hunk’s bare stomach, trying to get a reading that made sense.  Coran was searching the cabinets again, this time just barely managing not to smash a series of small vials.  Pidge was curled up around the holoscreen.

Lance leaned down next to her.  “What’s the big secret?” he whispered, making her jump a little.

She glanced over her shoulder, checking to see that Keith was occupied.  He was.  He was clutching a pillow against his stomach, white-knuckling it so hard that it was amazing that he hadn’t ripped a hole in it yet.  She turned back, scrolling down the file.  “It’s… this.”

Wow, that was a lot of four syllable words.  “I can’t read that stuff, just like… explain it so it's Lance-friendly.”

Pidge sighed.  “His brain.  I found the part about his brain.  The new quintessence in his system is pretty volatile, and sometimes it interacts with native quintessence in… nasty ways.  The brain seems to be the place where it goes wrong if it’s going to go wrong.”

“So, what, can we just stop it from getting to his brain?”

“That depends.  It’s kinda like… chicken pox.  The chickenpox virus usually occurs in little kids, which, oddly enough, the stress reaction of the Galra bladder or whatever actually _does_ usually happen in kids.  I don’t know why Keith didn’t turn sooner, but whatever.  His must have been triggered by the Druid, somehow.”  She made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat.  “The point is, the virus can sometimes linger in the cerebral-spinal fluid.  Like having chicken pox as a kid, and then getting shingles as an adult.  Coran thinks he knows a way to stop it, but if we mistime it or if the quintessence crosses the blood-brain barrier and gets into his spinal fluid anyway, the rest of the transformation could be triggered later on.  If… if leaving his brain human when the rest of his body is Galra doesn’t kill him anyway.”

Lance let that process for a moment.  “…Oh,” he said.

“So just… keep him calm for a while, until we can figure this out.  Hey look, you’re needed!”  Pidge gave him a shove, and Lance swallowed down a whole new wave of nerves as he walked back across the room.

Hunk and Allura seemed to have gotten the ultrasound thingy to work enough to use, and they were positioned on either side of Keith, ready to use it.  Keith, on the other hand… didn’t seem to be quite on board.

“Back off!” he growled, voice hoarse.  He’d rolled mostly onto his stomach, curled up with his elbows tucked almost underneath him like a sick cat.  Even from a few steps away, Lance could hear the kid’s insides churning.  His shoulders shook, his neck barely seemed to be able to hold up his head, and fresh drops of sweat slicked his face.  In a word, he looked awful.  He was protecting his stomach with everything he had, even resorting to snapping his teeth when Hunk made a motion to take his shoulder.  The quick movement seemed to have unintended backlash, however, as his face went a strange white-grey, his eyes going unfocused for a moment.  The moment was all it took for Allura to get her hands on him.

“Hunk, now!” she said, raising Keith from the table and cradling his upper body in her arms.  With one hand she gently lifted his shirt from his bloated stomach.  The skin was bruised almost black, a mess of strange clotting blood somewhere under the surface.  Keith whimpered, these high-pitched terrified noises, and Lance was just thinking about how many strange new sounds he’d heard today when the two of them locked eyes.

Wild.  That was the word that stuck.  Those dark eyes, just a shade off from black, had the look of something wild and panicked—an animal in a steel trap, hissing desperately to keep the humans back because it didn’t know what to expect short of more pain.

Keith broke the contact when Hunk gently pressed the instrument to his middle.  He kicked, but Hunk just leaned on his thighs, pinning him down.  His chest heaved.  He was crying.  Oh no, oh fuck, he was _crying_.  He was like a tiny child with a scraped-up knee, his hands clutching at Allura’s firm arm as she wrapped it securely around his shoulders.  He couldn’t seem to even get a whole breath in, his ribcage jerking with gasps that came out as sobs.  Hunk was humming, something that seemed to be an attempt to be soothing, but he couldn’t make Keith feel better and also focus on what he was doing at the same time.  Allura was too occupied just holding him still.  Lance felt the sheets slip from his fingers, and then he was there.

At any other time, he would have been ecstatic to be nearly pressed against Allura’s side, but too much of his attention was focused on Keith.  He tried to talk to him, to say things that would help, but Keith’s sobs were getting louder and he couldn’t compete.  So instead he did what his Mama used to do when he was really small and having a tantrum—cradled Keith’s head in one hand and used the other to stroke away the tears.  It didn’t matter that more and more kept falling to replace them.  He just leaned close, pressed his forehead against Keith’s stringy hair, and wiped away each one, humming softly.  If this were any other time, if it were any other situation, this would be embarrassing as all hell.  He was stroking the guys face, for fuck’s sake.  But Keith’s guttural whining, the pitiful sort of deep-lung sobbing, made him not care in the slightest.  Especially when Keith, his poor face stretched almost in a smile from the pain, started to finally take deeper breaths again.

“Shhhh…” Lance said, and he brought both his hands up to cup Keith’s cheeks, holding his quivering form still.  Keith’s hands clutched at his wrists, desperate.  “It’s almost over…  It’s almost done… just breathe with me… in… out… good…”

They stayed like that for a while, until Hunk’s guilty voice told them he was done.  Then Allura was letting go, and Keith literally just crumbled back to the bed.  Lance took a moment to fetch the sheets and tucked them around the boy’s shoulders.  Keith just… stayed where he had flopped, his breath short against the thin mattress, his arms curling up tight around him once again.

Then, the motion rolling up from somewhere deep inside of him, Keith leaned to the side and threw up… everything.

It was the remnants of gall and stomach acid mixed up in a slurry with thick, slimy blood and all kinds of bits of tissues.  Some of them were nearly liquid but not quite, and some of them were thick with little stringy bits that could almost have been muscle, and all of it just came out like a waterfall, flowing from the back of his tongue.  It splattered on the floor in a mess of bruisey reds with a few pinks and yellows and, Lance was horrified to find, at least one tooth.  He stared at it all, trying to comprehend what he was seeing.  It didn’t feel real.  Not the bits of digestive organs, not the strangled noises coming from Keith, not the thick strings of mucus and blood that splattered everything between Keith and the floor.

Keith coughed and shuddered, and another round of sludge came up.  This one was thicker—the parts that sank to the bottom.  Bits of intestines, nearly whole strips of them, dangled from his lips and he had to claw at his mouth to get them out.  Lance walked forward, floating, and in a daze he put his hand on Keith’s back.  Some instinct told him to rub in circles, so he tried.  Another heave—this one had less whole bits and more of something that seemed almost the texture of runny mud.  A few drops hit Lance’s hand and he tried to brush it off.  It was… gritty.  Just like before.  Gritty blood.  Like fine sand…

That must have been his bones.  Whatever was left of them, anyway—the calcium that was stripped from his skeleton.  It had to go somewhere, and Lance almost laughed at how stupid he had been to not think of that.

That was the tipping point for him.  He had no clue where anyone else was, no idea what was going on around them, he just suddenly knew that he needed to back away before he threw up all over poor Keith.

It was abrupt, and it was over quickly.  He coughed and vomited and suddenly felt a little better.  He wiped his mouth with shaky hands and turned back to Keith.  Keith was… doing less good.  Each breath out ushered up another wave of anything left inside of him, and he was doing everything he could just to get enough air in.  He groaned and spit and out came another tooth—there were three or four in the mess on the floor, and one clinging grotesquely to his chin.  He coughed and choked and things were still coming up and everything was bad.

Lance didn’t pause to check in with anyone else—he just grabbed the nearest towel and brought it to Keith’s mouth, cleaning up a little of the blood that coated his lip and chin and trying to keep the kid propped up so he wouldn’t nose-dive right off the edge of the bed.  Keith finally pulled in a decent breath, but when he did his hands clutched at his chest, and Lance had a feeling that he knew what was coming next.  He wrapped an arm around Keith’s shoulders, holding his swaying torso steady, and held the towel to catch the rest of the teeth that were slowly working their way out of Keith’s mouth.

 

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a good plan for updating but we all know at this point that I'm not a 'well-made plans' kind of person, lmfao. It's all going up in the next day or so.
> 
> Cheers!


	5. To Parasite Or Not To Parasite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Coran has a plan to protect Keith's vulnerable gray matter, but will the transformation even give them time to put it in motion? He really hopes so.
> 
> Primitive human synapses are still important, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coran is the perfect mix of ridiculous and dapper. You can't convince me otherwise, it's just how canon is.

There was a time many, many deca-phoebs past that Coran marveled at the advancements of science and the cutting edge of quintessence research.  He was there watching when Alfor and Honerva first dedicated their lives to the strange properties of the comet and the rift, respectively.  Watched them grow, watched them learn, watched an entirely new branch of science spring forth like the water of a geyser shooting toward the stars.  They had such high hopes for quintessence!  Such beautiful theories, the kind of theories that lifted the spirit of the Alteans.  ‘We could cure all disease’ they said, and it was almost too good to be true.

Until the day came when it _was_ too good to be true.  Of _course_  it was.  Not because they were wrong—but because they were right, and because Honerva, in her drive to conquer that which is unconquerable, set them down a path that went beyond creation and twisted back into destruction.  Coran never thought of himself as a philosophical man, really, but even he began to see the pattern there—the circular way that destruction fed creation fed destruction.

Of course, it was only bound to get worse after Alfor’s fall.  Ten thousand years running amuck was a hell of a long time to rip apart the universe in search of more power.  Which was how, Coran supposed, they got here.  Here being in a room, in the castle, with a paladin barely older than a child being torn apart from the inside out.

So it goes.  Coran continued to shove through the cryo-cabinet in search of a particular bottle he was _sure_ was in here somewhere, letting himself get lost in thought.  He’d developed a healthy respect for, and a wariness of, the power of quintessence in the millennia since its discovery.  If only the bloody empire had done the same.

Ah.  There it was.  “Found it!” Coran said, and he pulled his head out of the cabinet, bottle held high.  He turned around only to discover that the rest of the room was dead silent and stiller than a tiklia stalking a yellmor.  Keith was white and bloody.  He resembled the ‘wraiths’ from the blogs that Pidge liked to peruse with him, except in a crumpled black shirt, shrouded in bloodied sheets.  A puddle of something unsettling marred the floor and the bed around him.  Lance, much too pale, was holding him up.  Pidge, Hunk, and Allura were all facing away from Coran, staring at the two boys. 

Coran blinked.  “Well don’t just stand there, it’s time to get a move on!  We’ve got things to do and no time to do them!”

Hunk turned to him slowly.  “May I be excused?” he asked in a shaking voice.  His entire front was covered in vomit, no doubt a reaction to whatever Keith was doing.

Coran squinted.  “Well, I suppose so, Number Two, but only to get a change of uniform!”

The big guy left quickly, barely taking the time to open the door properly.

“This must mean I missed all the big stuff,” Coran grumbled, tossing the bottle in his hand across the room to Number Five.  Figured that he got lost in his head for a few scant minutes and suddenly everybody was losing their stomach contents on the floor.  This would require some special attention once everything was over and done with—he’d have to enlist Number Three to help him clean.  He made a note of it.

Pidge yelped, fumbling with the bottle and pinning it between her knees before she could drop it.  “This is… it?” she asked, holding it up to the light and squinting at it.  Admittedly, it wasn’t much to look at.  The creature inside required a very specific environment in order to hibernate for as long as the castle had been in stasis.  The bottle was temperature controlled, sealed off from any kind of light/radiation sources so as to keep the little guy asleep.  It was a good thing that particular species was known to live for millennia frozen in ice, or else they would be… what was the term?  Shit out of luck. 

The castle wasn’t meant to keep supplies on board, except in the special instances where particular items were needed for diplomatic reasons.  Instead, the castle was made with huge stores of raw elements that could be thrown together and synthesized into anything the occupants needed—food goo, medicine, clothing… the whole lot.  It was a design quirk required of a ship that had the ability to sit like a beached lorlack for ten thousand years and pick up again just like that—didn’t need all of your supplies expiring while you were cryofrozen.  So really, the fact that they still had this particular vial in pristine condition was one for the books.

“Don’t turn your nose up just yet, Number Five,” Coran said cheerfully.  “It’s the strong stuff.”  Without further ado, he slid across the room to the red paladin, checking screens as he went.  Humans… they were so odd about everything.  And their bodies were no better—just sacks of organs, some of which he’d been told didn’t even have a use.  Preposterous.  “Temperature a hundred and six, blood pressure falling… is this the ultrasound doohickey?  My, there was nothing inside of you but soup… but belly no longer distended, so I guess that got cleared up.”  He tried for a laugh.  No one in the room could do much more than grimace back.  He coughed awkwardly.

“If my theory is right, we only have about ten or twenty minutes before the next round of changes get to the puking-up-insides stage.  That would be… maybe fifteen dobashes.  Not much time,” Pidge said quietly, clutching the bottle to her chest.  She looked back to Coran, and Coran stood up, settling as close to Keith as he could so as to break the news faster and easier.  Like tearing off a synthetic medicinal adhesive.  He tried to catch the boy’s roaming eyes—they were half-lidded and hazy, glassy, like all the fire they normally held had been drowned by the sheer abundance of _change_ happening to his small frame.  “Are you with us at all right now, man?  This is important,” Pidge said, leaning toward the bed when it became clear that he hadn’t heard a single word.

For a moment, the silence came back, heavier than before.  Keith’s head was hanging, his limbs trembling, breath oddly wet in his chest.  He mumbled a string of undecipherable syllables as if to himself—everyone strained to understand him, the translator only picking up a word here and there from the slurred mess.  Shiro’s name, a small _please_ , something that sounded like a kit’s call for its mother.  He seemed to fight against himself, struggling to stay awake, and despite all that he was crying—slow, unhurried tears that welled up from his eyes to drop lazily down the curve of his cheeks, like they had all the time in the universe. 

For another minute or so, there was nothing but a few soft hiccups.  Lance kept him steady, slowly coaxing him to sit back a little.  Strings of red steadily dripped from his lips as Lance held the towel to his mouth and whispered, “hey, shhh, it’s okay.  It’s okay.  It’ll be over soon.  We just need you to focus for a little bit, okay?  Can you do that?”

It took what felt like a century.  Long enough that Allura clasped her hands tightly in front of her, a curbed display of apprehension and anxiety that Coran recognized from the many deca-phoebs he’d known her.  Pidge was rocking on her toes, one eye locked on a ticker, the other glancing at the Altean symbols on the bottle that she obviously was struggling to read.  Coran reached forward, placing his gloved hand on Keith’s shoulder, rubbing it soothingly. 

Finally, Keith took a deep breath, forcing himself to look up at them with a small nod that was hardly more than a muscle tremor.  Lance followed his chin, helping him stay steady even when it looked like all he wanted to do was collapse.

“Keith,” Coran said, dropping all pretense of humor he previously had.  There simply wasn’t time anymore.  This had to happen now, and it had to happen fast.  “The ride from here is only going to get rockier.  We don’t have any documentation of this happening in a human-hybrid, so we don’t know what the specifics will look like.  What we do know is that this… change tends to cause problems in the brain.”

“W’re my options?” Keith slurred, speaking through huge gaps in his teeth.  He retched for a moment, tipping ungainly over his lap, and another tooth tumbled from his lips.  Somehow, he managed to stay focused, his eyes rising to meet Coran’s as soon as he could raise his head again.  Lance held him up, supporting most of his weight.  Pidge and Allura stared on, worried.

Coran gestured broadly, bringing Pidge forward.  “We have a small parasite that eats quintessence.  If we can place it just right inside of you, the bad quintessence that’s causing this change won’t be able to reach your brain.”

“…But?” Keith asked.  His voice almost faltered, but he forced it out.  He was so _little_ , compared to most of the other humans that Coran had met, and compared to a Galra he was _minuscule_.  Like this, he even seemed small and frail in comparison to Pidge, like his body was made of thin, folded paper instead of all the normal things that made up a human.  Like his entire being was ready to collapse inwards under its own weight.

Coran straightened his back, standing tall, his hand still planted on the boy’s shoulder as if he could prevent such an occurrence simply by holding him steady.  He staunchly refused to think about the new words he’d learned today—he couldn’t think about the reactions the paladins all had at the mention of ‘eugenics’ because if he did, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to stand tall for them all.  Oh, some of the things he’s seen… Keith didn’t deserve that fate.  He deserved the truth, he deserved a _chance_.  Coran could not get emotional about this.  Strength was learned, after all—and he’d had a lot of lessons by now.

“A number of things can go wrong.”  Good start.  He raised a gloved hand, ticking each off as he went.  “The parasite can move around and eat up good quintessence that you need.  We could mistime it and the bad quintessence could enter your spinal cord anyway.  We can keep all the bad quintessence out and the good quintessence in only for your body to find that it can’t sustain having a partial transformation.  Or maybe everything will happen exactly how we want it, only for the rest of the transformation to be triggered later on.  We don’t really have answers for this, my boy.”  He lowered his arms.  It was still harder than he thought it ought to be, to say so much and have so little actual concrete information. 

He sighed and tried again.  Thank the heavens that the words came to him, after everything.  The battle, the bickering, the hundreds upon hundreds of error messages he seemed to receive every single time they tried to stand up against the imperial might of the Galra—every day was a struggle in this war, but at least he got these words out.  “You could lose your memory.  You could… you might not ever be the same if the transformation takes its course.  But if it doesn’t, you might be in incredible pain for the rest of your life.  I’m sorry, but we don’t have answers.  It’s up to you.  Do you want to risk it?  Or risk the other option?”

Keith’s hazy eyes seemed to bore into his own, a little bit of his old self resurfacing momentarily to weigh his options for just a moment.

“Parasite or no parasite?” Coran asked.

Keith opened his mouth.  The answer seemed to be on the tip of his tongue.  Then his eyes bulged, a gurgle came up his throat, and he was cut rudely off.

Coran would have liked to see what human lungs looked like before they turned to goo and were ejected from the mouth.  The curiosity was killing him.  Unfortunately, he didn’t have a chance, because there was no time.  This one seemed to happen fast, an instantaneous reaction—probably because the lungs were so important.  For two seconds, Keith was clutching desperately at his chest and throat, leaving angry red score marks up and down his skin.  It was like his throat had just sealed up—no air passed his lips at all, not even enough for a wheeze.  Then, with an efficiency that was beautiful and terrifying both, out the rest of everything came.  Lobes of soft tissue just liquified enough to fit up his esophagus came up with such force that some of the liquid was squeezed up his sinuses and out his nose. 

Lance let out an ungodly screech, holding onto Keith tighter than Keith probably wanted, but he didn’t let go.  Keith writhed, folding over himself.  He tried to prop his hands up on the bed but they slipped in the mess.  A spasm clenched up his entire torso, and a good bit more came up—he made noises like he was trying to gasp around a bone stuck in his throat.  He hacked, spasmed again.  His body shook.  He tried to breathe—there was nothing there to accept the air.

Lance’s face was nothing but sheer terror, looking at Coran for help.  Keith’s throat worked, his insides heaved, but whatever was left wasn’t coming up.  It wouldn’t.  It was stuck inside of him—he was choking on his own lungs.  Coran leapt forward, grabbing Keith’s small—he was so _small_ —chin, and pushed two fingers in his mouth, moving them from side to side as he worked his way back, trying to find the piece that was stuck.  Lance, putting the puzzle together, shifted until he had both arms wrapped around Keith from behind and gave him a swift squeeze.  Keith made an unpleasant noise, a gurgle deep in his throat.  His face, already blotchy from before, was starting to turn a blueish grey.  That did NOT seem like a proper part of this transformation.  Pidge and Allura both were yelling, but that didn’t matter because they needed to solve this problem or there wouldn’t be time for the next.  Keith clawed at his own mouth, at Coran’s fingers, still probing.  Coran pulled back and let him in.

The last piece was spectacularly nasty, a twisted, half-melted chunk of some kind of tubing that was just slightly too long to work its way up on its own.  When Keith got a hold of it and pulled, it seemed to wrench out of him, stretching and pulling as he clawed.  He got it about halfway up and then suddenly he was vomiting—not blood and guts, this time, but actual stomach-acid vomit, which implied that his organs were rebuilding themselves.  Most of it came out his nose, but the force of it was finally enough to dislodge the last dangling bit, and it hit the bed with a splat.

The first breath Keith pulled in was oddly soggy, but as he kept gasping, the room could virtually hear his lungs reknitting themselves.  It was like listening to pneumonia heal.  Lance was slowly rocking him back and forth, both arms still wrapped around him, as they all held their breath and savored the sounds of strong inhales.  Keith’s face, under his flopping hair, was painted with things that shouldn’t be there, and Allura, who had been holding Pidge tight, slowly broke free and picked up the towel that Lance dropped.  With trembling hands, she reached forward and wiped his face, from his nose to his chin, like a mother would clean up a messy child.  His eyelids fluttered at the touch, but he didn’t seem awake enough to open his eyes all the way.  He batted weakly at her when she tried to rub his cheeks clean.  Instead, she caught his hands and tended to them.  It was methodical, how she carefully wrapped up each of his fingers, wiping away the sticky gross things that clung in between them. 

Pidge, meanwhile, had found a clean towel and was running it under water.  She wrung it out, untwisted it, and walked forward until she could press it against his sweaty brow.

Sadness, fear—they hung heavy on the air.  That, and the stench of what could only be described as offal.  Coran spent a moment cleaning himself up, letting them all have a moment’s break to gather themselves.  Then he turned to Pidge and gave her a meaningful look.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.  “We need an answer, Keith.  We need to know what you want to do.  Just make some kind of noise—do you want the parasite, yes or no?”

 

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter and the later Blade chapter are a lil shorter than the others, but I hope I captured a good balance of plot motion and characterization anyway. Idk, it just felt better to break it there.


	6. In Which Keith Goes Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, Keith took a hoverbike that wasn't strictly his and wandered out into the desert. He never told anyone, but in that timeless place, it was like Shiro was waiting just around the corner. Turns out it was just Blue, but still.
> 
> When Keith feels lost, Blue is always there to guide him.

Keith knew he had a choice to make.  He had an answer to give.  But he couldn’t, for the life of him, get it out.  “I want to go home,” he said instead, and his voice was like shattered glass coming up his throat.

“Home?  To your room?” Pidge asked.  She was worried, he could hear it even without seeing her face.  He couldn’t decipher why.  Wasn’t it obvious that he wanted to go home?  It was the only thing he could really feel that wasn’t the pain.  He just… wanted… _home_.

The tears were coming too fast now.  He tried to say the words, but the syllables got jammed and he could only get out small bits and pieces.  Not enough to explain to them.  How could he explain Shiro’s hugs?  He couldn’t.  And it wasn’t just the feeling of familiar arms looping around his shoulders and pulling him close, it was also the hum of the lions—the way they surrounded him just the same as Shiro’s solid warmth did.  How they carried him when Shiro was too far to hold.  He just wanted to be back there, with the calm blue energy that seemed to thrum around and through the air in the desert, even before Shiro left and didn’t come back.  He wanted to feel whole, to feel like there was sand under his feet.  He wanted to feel Red swooping in, her jaws opening wide to pull him into her grasp.  He wanted to feel purpose again.  He wanted to feel _Shiro_.  He _wanted_ anything but this _pit of pain_.  That time in the desert… he didn’t know his future, and he didn’t care about his past, and it was like one long, timeless moment where he just existed in this place of calm and purpose and healing where Shiro was waiting just beyond his grasp to pull him close one last time and he WANTED THAT he wanted to be BACK THERE he wanted it so bad—

The only coherent word he could get up was the simplest one, but fortunately, it was the one that encompassed so much of the feeling of home.  He didn’t have it in him to worry about how Lance felt about it—he could barely even remember that Lance would have an emotion about this.  He just spit it out, hurtling it past all the still-healing welts that made up his throat.  Just the one word.

Blue.

And then he was either sobbing or blacking out, and he couldn’t quite tell the difference. 

When he came back to himself, he was cradled in someone’s arms.  Not like before—before he was mostly still on the bed, basically swimming in his own internal organs, with long arms wrapped around him as if to brace him against the awful tsunami that was his own body.  He remembered that.  Now, he was entirely curled up in big, thick arms, tucked against a chest much larger than his own.  He swayed back and forth, in time to a heavy tap, tap, tap… footsteps, he guessed.  Must be Hunk.  No one felt quite as big and sturdy as Hunk did…

His tongue was pinched, stuck between crowning points coming from the holes in his gums.  He was too tired to move it.  He almost dozed, except a familiar pain was starting to lick up and down his chest.  Not deep inside of his chest, this time—just under the surface, the muscles that cradled his bones.  If he went as limp as he could, it almost didn’t hurt.  It was like a bad sprain—and he could handle that, he had those all the time.  Maybe it wouldn’t get so bad.  Maybe… maybe.

“Hey,” said a deep voice, rumbling through both of their chests.  “Is he awake?  I can’t really see through all his hair.”

Hands, small and cool, patted through the thick fringe sticking to his forehead.  He tried to open his eyes, wanted to see her teeny face and her huge, bright eyes peering at him.  He couldn’t quite make it.  But he did manage to make a small noise, and that was enough.

“Hey there,” Pidge exhaled, her voice breathy with both tension and relief.  “We’re going home, Keith.  Just hang in there a little longer.”

He… wasn’t sure that she knew what she was talking about.  That sounded like the kind of nonsense that you told to some poor fuck who was pretty much dead.  Which, honestly, summed up how he felt right now.  That didn’t matter, though—he still remembered the answer he needed to give, and he was going to give it now even if it did kill him.

He peeled his lips apart, stretched his jaw open (god, the muscles hurt), and took a deep breath.  He felt Pidge’s hair tickle his chin as she leaned close.  Good, he wouldn’t have to try too hard.

Five syllables.  Two, if he was lucky.  This was Pidge, though—two was probably enough.

“…Do it,” he gasped out, his voice like road gravel.  He waited.

She understood.  “The parasite it is,” she said with a laugh that wasn’t quite a real laugh.  “Now relax, please—we’re almost there.”

Where there was he had no idea, but he was content to tuck his aching jaw against Hunk’s chest and just focus on being a ragdoll until their arrival.  Like this he could hear everything around him—five sets of footsteps, the harried squeaks of Allura’s mice, Lance whispering with Coran with his tongue tied in a ball of barely contained stress.  They were walking almost in step, the whole lot of them, until there was a soft _fwump_ and Lance cursed, his sneakers squealing on the floor as he scrambled about.  Hunk angled around him, carefully clutching Keith.  Lance’s voice seemed to sweep in, like the tide, his words coalescing in Keith’s ears as they passed.

“—don’t even know if this is enough or if we’ll be able to wash them or anything but that’s okay, right?  Like you’ve got to have a secret storeroom full of pillows and blankets somewhere in this place.  How could you survive otherwise?  Or do you have a… pillow maker machine?  Space pillow pills that you just pop in some water and they expand into full pillows?  Come on, Coran, there’s gotta be something—” and then his voice was drifting away again, the volume lost as he was left behind with what could only be assumed to be a pile of blankets on the floor.

Coran, still keeping pace, considered a moment, pulling at his mustache with a distinct squeak.  “Nooo, not that I can recall, Number Three.  We used to ship in these beautiful fluffy beasts to shave them for fabric.  Haven’t heard any news about them since I woke, I’m almost sure the poor species has been wiped out.  We’ve had to suffice with the synthesizers.”

Lance huffed, now muffled.  He was picking up the pace again, quieting himself as he closed in on the group.  “We have those, too.  On earth.  They’re called sheep.”

“Oh, really?  Maybe we should stop by and retrieve some.  What do you guys do about the secondary jaws?  I’d always get some pretty nasty bites when it was my turn to take care of them—”

And on and on like that.  Keith let the conversations fall into the background as suddenly she was there.  Red.  Her voice, less like a voice and more like a steady thrum through his mind, fluffed up around his soul until she was all but cradling him.  Her body slipped into his range of senses as if his prioperception had linked up to hers—her paws seemed like his paws, and her tail seemed like his tail, and she was everywhere.  She stepped out of her alcove to the greater space at the center of the hangars, curling her giant body around Hunk as he carried Keith into the middle of the room.

God, he missed her… he missed her so much.  Black was good, a strong presence and a terrifying force to unleash on their enemies, but compared to Red she was cold.  So, so cold, like the vacuum of space.

Red growled low, in the back of his head, bringing him back to the moment.  Lance and Pidge were flitting around, setting up a pile of pillows in the nook between her front paws, just in front of where her chin was resting on the cool, gray floor.  It was in that nook that Hunk tried to set Keith down, but it didn’t feel right.  Keith moaned, holding on despite the flashes of pain that coursed up his muscle fibers, fingers to elbows—he didn’t want to let go. 

“Okay… okay…” Hunk said, understanding.  “Let me just get comfortable, then you can lay on me.”

That was good.  He felt just a tiny bit better knowing that Hunk would be right there.  And the others, too, even as Pidge leaned over skeptically and said, “Hunk, you’re not gonna puke on him, right?”

“Not unless he pukes on me first,” Hunk said back, his voice low and melodic like he was talking to a sleepy kitten.  Keith felt him slowly running a hand up and down his back, and somehow it helped.  He didn’t understand why this felt good when hands on him at the beginning felt like battering rams, but he didn’t have enough processing power to figure it out.  The others backed off for a moment—through Red’s eyes he saw Coran prepping what he could only assume was a spinal tapping needle.  He knew it would hurt, and as they came forward he stiffened just a little, but… the needle barely felt like anything compared to the last however long of agony.  He could have laughed, especially at the expressions everyone else was making as they waited for his reaction.  Red, too, was amused—she chuffed in his mind, watching their bafflement as he shrugged off the shot.

The needle pulled out, and he just sighed, nuzzling into Hunk’s chest.  He moaned softly, his entire body as limp as he could get it.  “How you doing?” Lance asked from somewhere to his side.  Everybody was waiting.  It was the most peaceful he’d felt since this entire thing began.

He had to be honest, though.  “Hurts to move,” he mumbled, and now his tongue was aching, too.  Hunk just continued to rub a big, warm hand up and down his spine.  His consciousness came in waves—from awake and alert to sinking into the warm embers of Red’s presence and then back again.

“Is he going to get flayed open?” Lance finally asked, when the silence had stretched too long.  “Like, are his muscles going to fall off?”

Pidge sighed.  “From what I can tell, Galra musculature is actually quite similar to human.  I don’t think it has much to change.  It might just feel kinda achey for a bit.”

Keith hummed to himself, half an acknowledgment.  Lance fidgeted around, adjusting blankets.  Hunk kept massaging, letting Keith doze a little against his chest.

“So… what’s next?” Lance whispered.  His whispering was loud, but Keith couldn’t find it in himself to put up a fuss.  He felt like he could sink fully into the fuzz of unconsciousness if the pain were just a little less heavy on his tired body.

“Veins and arteries, maybe?  Or maybe not.  Maybe… skin—?”

Pidge kept theorizing, but suddenly Keith stiffened like ice had been dumped in his veins.  He felt it—it was coming.  He gasped, bolting upright, nearly wrenching himself from Hunk’s hands.  He was panting, and half a dozen hands reached out to steady him, but he couldn’t do anything but clutch desperately at his chest because he _knew what was coming_ _oh god he’d never been less prepared for anything in his life_ —

“Keith?  What is it?” several voices asked, in a panic, as he squeezed his eyes closed and folded forward around his ribcage.

“H-h-heart—“ he managed to say, before a solid bolt of pain slammed through him.  It was like his heart was being squeezed under a hydraulic press, the chambers splitting at their seams, except even those words couldn’t really describe the sheer agony of his heart coming apart string by string by string.  He keened, clawing at his ribs.  It was pounding so hard and so fast that it felt like a concussive drumroll in his throat and lungs, like it was trying to hyperventilate his body before—

He crashed.

This, he supposed, was something like death.  He’d learned to see through his lion’s eyes since his promotion to Defender of the Universe, and oddly, it felt a little similar to that.  Like his body was becoming loose around him, his molecules separating to allow his spirit to stretch beyond and rise until he was looking down at his own fragile little form, his dark hair under a pile of the other paladins as they desperately tried to hold him steady, hold him upright, hold a basin in front of him, and  _keep him alive_ , all while shouting desperately at each other and the Alteans.  The words felt like feathers, tickling at him.

He felt better than he had in a long, long time.  Maybe as long as it had been since Shiro’s disappearance.  Maybe as long as it had been since before Kerberos.  He didn’t really know anymore—so much of his life he’d been fighting, struggling, trying to keep his shit together before everything blew up in his face one more time.  He never did seem able to stop it—it was like something predestined, a destiny mixed from his volatile genes and his dubious mental health and whatever sense of humor the universe was entertaining that particular day.

He blinked a little, turning his gaze to the side.  Red’s eyes lit up, boring into him.  He was right next to her, floating at her crown.  Her presence was bright like a firecracker up here, a wreath of flames—and through it, around it, came ribbons of something cool, something of liquid substance that wove between them and curled like a sigh around his cheek. 

Oh.  Blue.  He could have smiled.  Blue was the reason he found his lion, after all.  The reason he found Shiro again.  Even though he was the Red Paladin, even though he’d been forced away from Red and into Black’s deathly cold cockpit, even after _everything_ , Blue was threaded through his bones.  He owed everything to her.

The two lions rumbled, deep growls reverberating through whatever liminal space he was currently occupying.  He hummed softly in their direction.  He was unconcerned.  He knew what they were so desperately worried about—that he would let go after all this, leave his body to wither and die for good.  That this… out of body experience would become permanent and just like that he would slip away. 

It wasn’t unimaginable.  He could imagine it very clearly, in fact.  That was how he knew that death wasn’t in the cards tonight.  He knew he had to go back.  He _wanted_ to, the will to live was _seared into every impulse he had_ , every _instinct_ , every _desire_ —if he didn’t make it, if he… if he lost himself like this… he would never see Shiro again and he refused.  He _REFUSED_.  To die and let go when Shiro was still lost out there somewhere.

As if it had been waiting, a third presence seemed to ooze up from the floor, fighting against itself to rise.  A third pair of eyes lit up, and the hangar was thrust into darkness as the Black Lion loomed.  She breathed and it gave him strength—energy, like the fission inside of stars, welled up deep within the last tendrils of himself he was holding on to.  Pressure akin to that which formed diamonds bloomed across his hands, sparking pins and needles that dragged him back toward his body.  He watched, closer and closer, as he coughed up his heart, as Hunk hugged him and rocked, as Lance desperately patted his bloody face.

And he sank back down.

They managed to get it in the basin this time, which was good.  He opened gummy eyes and found Lance an inch from his face, holding his head up, his smile wide and shaky.  Pidge was leaning back, taking the basin and its contents away.  Her fingers were bloody from where she had to help get the last of it out—she was almost as bloody as he was, and her relief was palpable despite sitting in slasher quality gore.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have the chance to take a moment to breathe, much less appreciate the fact that he survived losing his _heart_ , before the pain took over.  Somehow it was worse than before, like having the reprieve of leaving his body only made it come crashing down on him more intense than ever.  It was in his _skin_ , his _muscles_ —god it was in his eyes and his gums and every little bit of flesh in between.  He thrashed in Hunk’s grip, a high, keening noise curling out of his throat.  His muscles felt like they were pulling in a thousand different directions at once, fibers splitting from fibers, unraveling from around his bones.  It didn’t take long to realize that moving only made it worse, and he went limp again, mouthing a breathy, “Please please please please—“

Hunk whined in distress, rubbing his shoulders.  It helped, but not enough.  He took a few gasping breaths, exhaled an impatient grunt, and then used the very last of his energy to twist his body until he rested, snug, against Hunk’s chest.  He curled his aching fingers into Hunk’s shirt. 

He was nothing but pain.  His body had been replaced by a hurt so acute he no longer had any words for it.  It was just… all over.  The surface of his skin was a raw wound.  Red and Blue and Black, all of them, nuzzled up to his consciousness, purring deep inside of him.  It didn’t do much, not even as Green and Yellow finally joined in—the mechanical beats of their processors turning over like enormous, synthetic hearts was just one more thing too far away to reach or even understand.  Pressure wrapped around him, in the shape of Hunk’s arms, but it didn’t help at all now.  He was beyond help.  He didn’t understand—he couldn’t make sense of anything, he just knew that it was too much.

He couldn’t _do it_.  It was _too much_.

He couldn’t stop himself when the fog in his head overpowered him.  Everything was bad and his jaws moved on their own, he lashed out and bit whatever was closest to him and held on because it _hurt_ he couldn’t _do this_ —

The skin of his lips and nose flayed off, contracting and breaking down like clay cracking under the desert sun.  He sank his teeth in deeper, high keens rippling through his vocal chords.  What were once fingernails and now just feel like _open nerve endings_ clawed at his face, his neck, his _chest_.  Flesh came off in their wake.  There were noises in his ears—yells as Hunk and Pidge tried to keep ahead of him, tried to cut the last of his clothes away before they got tangled up in the layers of skin that rolled off of him and wrinkled at his joints. 

Lance whimpered softly, too quiet to hear except for the fact that Keith was pressed right up against him.  He couldn’t stop and think, couldn’t process why Lance was making noises like that, but he did manage to catch one clear look at Lance’s tear-filled eyes before his own irises started to bleed down the open wound that was his face.

It was a bad dream.  It had to be.  It was like the point of a fever dream when the very fabric of the dreamscape began to fall apart, looping and looping and looping the instant that your body hit the ground after you jumped from a building.  It was so _much_.  Death _itself_ couldn’t create an ending so awful that there was a moment in which every individual cell dying was a new wave of pain.

He couldn’t feel his lungs.  His tongue came loose in his mouth—the last little bits followed, the last of whatever held him together, and he was so ridiculously _cold_ he almost wished he had muscles just so he could shiver.  Like ice, like fire, like nerves exposed to the air.  He’d never been this cold before—he’d never felt cold hangar floors against his bones before.  His jaw went slack as the muscle receded, the bones parting, and whatever he’d managed to catch in his mouth slid out along with his tongue.  

And then, from his gut, came winding a new encasement.  Tendons crawled up his skeleton.  With a jerk, his muscles started catching up.  His entire body trembled, knitting itself back together.  His head snapped back as muscle crept up the back of his neck.  He gasped in, short and shallow, fighting to breathe with a body that suddenly felt too tight as new skin curled around limbs, joints, torso, face.  His eyes throbbed in his head, transmitting nothing but awful little flashes of light until suddenly he saw faces, real faces staring down at him.  He screwed them shut again as hair shot through his new skin in the form of a million teeny needles pulling the thinnest, most delicate thread right through him.

And then, with one final pulse, everything was finally righted.

He was so exhausted, it was like the world was made of thick white honey.  It was all so bright, and even though there was movement and sound and even what he thought might be his own name, he was nearly unconscious with his eyes open.

Then Red’s heat bloomed in his head, giving him a little nudge, and he blinked Lance into focus.

 

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The hard part is over. It's okay, Keith. I know. /I know./


	7. In Which Allura Picks Up a New Earth Custom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's been approximately ten phoebs since Allura last saw a bed, but that's all right because the worst seems to be over. All that's left is clean-up and cuddling to get the taste of fear off everyone's tongue.
> 
> If she ever says anything as imprudent as 'let fear be your guide' ever again, let someone smack her soundly cross the face.

It took a long time for Keith to still, but once he did, Allura took the first deep breath she’d had in what felt like ages.  It was common knowledge that as a Princess and daughter of the leader of the Altean Coalition, she’d been trained for everything.  From proper dress to how to command an army, she knew how to approach every situation, and if she didn’t know the particulars she knew how to fake it till she made it.  And yet… she never realized how young and inexperienced she actually was until today. 

Sure, she felt small, _too_ small, when she sat in the cockpit of the Red Lion and begged the majestic creature to take her on as paladin, but this… never had she been quite so unprepared to handle a string of events.  It began with losing one-seventh of her faithful team to thin air, and stretched on until now, as she watched another of her paladins be torn apart by a biological imperative.  She wondered, faintly, if her father had once felt like this.  Was this what it was like to watch every step Zarkon took on the path that would eventually turn his back to Voltron?

Maybe, hopefully, she would never know what it felt like to endure that kind of betrayal.  For a while, she’d thought that Keith coming forward as Galra was something similar, but… it really wasn’t.  It took barely more than a movement for her to realize that Keith was as much a victim in this as she was.  It was in part how he had been torn from his family and his heritage, the same as she, and in part the fact that the Galra Empire was evidently just as cruel to its own people as it was to any outsider.  And humans, it seemed, were hardly any better.

That, however, was something to ponder on another time.  Right now, all she could really do was follow the example of the others, watching carefully with their breath all but silent on their lips, hoping that no irreparable damage had been done by the transformation.  She listened intently, waiting for a sign one way or another.  Then, from the ring of Paladins shielding Keith from view, came Lance’s voice.

“I can’t believe he actually bit me.  This is gonna scar.”

A smack echoed across the hangars.  Lance shrugged it off, shuffling in the nest of pillows.  Oh, what Allura wouldn’t do to get in there to just _see_ what was going on.  But it didn’t feel right—it wouldn’t _be_ right.  The earthlings had been through so much together it would feel like an intrusion to insert herself between them.

That didn’t stop her from listening in, pretending that she didn’t notice the mice inching closer to the territory between the Red Lion’s front paws.  There was Lance, still speaking softly.  “…Keith, hey… hey buddy…”

Allura clutched her fingers anxiously in the fabric of her dress, all her attention focused on the pauses between his words.  The Lions seemed to do the same.  At least, as much as giant mechanical creatures could do—their muzzles were tilted, angled toward the group huddled on the floor instead of the stately poses they usually held.  From where they watched, a perspective several stories above the floor, they must have had a clear view of Keith.  She could still only see Lance’s back as he leaned over the limp figure she assumed was still there.  He was in Hunk’s lap, now, having slipped from the Yellow Paladin’s grip as he thrashed and cried.  The whole lot of them were covered in… well, rather gruesome things, but none of them except perhaps Hunk even seemed to notice.

A small mewling noise finally worked its way out of their protective huddle, and Allura felt her shoulders drop with relief.  A breath seemed to escape all of them, the anxiety exhaled, their forms untensing ever so slightly.  Beside her, Allura heard Coran sniff heartily.  It was all right—Keith was alive, at least, and he was surrounded by people who would walk through hell to make sure this never happened again.  Allura took Coran’s hand, holding tight for a moment.  _It was all right_ , he said in the way he squeezed back.  Everything was going to be okay.

“There you are,” Lance murmured, and Hunk shifted to cradle Keith more securely in his arms.  “You’re okay, you’re okay… we’re gonna clean you up so just sit tight, okay?  Just relax…”

Another noise.  Allura crept forward, hoping to get a better look as Pidge wiped at his face with a towel and Lance pulled one of the cleaner blankets tight around his shoulders. 

She expected the first thing to strike her to be the color.  And yes, his skin had taken up the violet hue unique to the Galra, that was certainly true.  When his eyes opened to thin slits, roving, she could clearly see the deep gold of a Galra soldier.  And yet she almost couldn’t pause to take in the cosmetic changes when she was so focused on studying his face, trying to read his expression and see if he was well and truly _okay_. 

She was still too far to make much out.  After a moment she gave it up in favor of connecting with the mouse pawing its way up Pidge’s shirt to sit atop her head.  Thank heaven for those mice!

Not so much for the Galra, though.  Keith looked like he wanted to cry but was too exhausted to actually do it.  He had turned his head in toward Hunk’s chest like he wanted to nuzzle into it, his neck limp.  Did he lack the strength to seek out comfort?  Had he strength to do anything?  He’d definitely lost weight—she couldn’t tell how much, not with how protectively the others were curled around him, but it was obvious that he didn’t have much energy at all right now.

“’s it over?” he asked finally, rolling his eyes toward the paladins between slow, dazed blinks.

“We think so,” Pidge said, so tenderly.  Allura had never heard the youngest paladin’s voice sound like that.  Had anybody?  Had Shiro?  Perhaps, or perhaps it was a tone usually reserved for no one but her elder brother, still missing.  Allura’s heart ached.

Keith closed his eyes as if refocusing himself.  It took him a few long minutes to come back, asking, “…my brain?”

The paladins dutifully parted for Coran to kneel among them, pulling up a portable scanner.  He allowed the mouse to climb atop his hand and pat anxiously at the screen.  Everyone waited with bated breath until finally—

“The parasite held.  Brainwaves strong and uninterrupted, spinal fluid at normal levels… Unless there’s anything lingering in your system, you’re going to be fine.”

Everyone cheered, a tenth of their normal volume in respect for the solemnity of the event and Keith’s dipping chin.  The mice raised their little paws up in the air.  Coran stood again, coming back to Allura’s side.  “We’ll have to do some extensive testing once he’s rested up just to make sure.  His physiology is bound to be vastly different now,” he said aloud, thoughtful, but none of the humans seemed to be listening anymore.  Allura couldn’t blame them—it was one thing to have scientific reports and instruments and conversations about _physiology_ , and it was quite another to have Keith _right there_ , his screams just barely dying down from where they’d echoed through every crevice in the castle.

Allura clasped her hands in front of her chest, finally taking several concerned steps forward until she was kneeling amid her team.  She could tell that her eyes were glistening by the sympathetic look Lance gave her, but she didn’t try to hide it as she leaned forward, resting her forehead against Keith’s temple.

“You did so well,” she said.  And, though she knew that it was unlikely that he would remember this, she felt she had to say it: “I am so, _so_ sorry you had to go through that.” 

“Yeah, that was awful just to look at,” Hunk moaned dramatically as she leaned back again, and then Coran slithered in with a cup of tea, a simple enough idea that turned out to be not so simple when it took three of them to get Keith to drink a little without accidentally spilling it down his face.  Lance kept getting side-tracked by the short bristly hair on the boy’s head, mumbling to himself that somehow he expected the mullet to survive and now he was sorely disappointed.  By the end of teatime, Pidge had collapsed sideways and was giggling uncontrollably into Lance’s leg.  Hunk was still resolutely staring at the ceiling, refusing to look down at the frankly disturbing scene that still surrounded them, but he was insistent that Keith get something to eat before anything else.

So they fed him.  Little bits of some cut up meat on ‘toothpicks’ from a tray that Hunk prepared while he was away gathering himself.  At the first bite, Keith’s stomach growled so loud that they could hear it even over Red’s purr.  He whimpered, mouth obviously sore as he gnawed at it, but he was hungry enough to suffer through.  He opened his mouth quickly for another piece, the now-uniform pointed teeth—like little lizard teeth, according to Lance—clicking together until it came.  Allura couldn’t help it—she laughed outright, prompting the rest of them to join in.  It was the most surreal thing she’d ever experienced: sitting in a pile of gory bedding, hand-feeding their former Red Paladin, Hunk stroking his short hair the whole time and cooing softly.  Pidge had started snorting, she was giggling so hard, getting loopy.  It was a good thing that Keith was so out of it. 

They got quite a few of the treats into him before his eyelids really started to droop.  From one moment to the next the need for sleep overcame the need for sustenance.  And yet… he groaned, forcing his eyes open again.

“Buddy, it’s okay,” Lance said, patting him on the elbow.  “Just go to sleep, alright?”

He did not.  Somehow, he got a claw around Lance’s wrist, pulling it over to examine the bite marks he’d left on Lance’s hand during the last awful push of the transformation.  He seemed to want to remark upon it, but he was immediately derailed by Lance.

“What is it, you beautiful purple cryptid?” Lance asked, rubbing said purple cryptid’s knuckles in an oddly tender gesture.  “Tell Lancey-Lance what you need, my sweet alien mothman.”

Allura did not understand at least thirty percent of those words.  She didn’t have to, however, because Keith only caught one.  “…Purple?” he asked, and then he was trying to lift his head up to look despite everyone groaning at Lance and trying to usher him back down. 

It was Pidge who finally got him to relax again, her small hand pushing his forehead back into the crook of Hunk’s elbow.  “No.  _No_.  Stay.  You’re barely keeping your eyes open, you can get a look at yourself later,” she scolded.

“Yeah, and not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m sick of sitting in Keith soup, so can we like…”  Hunk gestured with his head, tipping it toward the door.

Pretty sure that Keith was already dozing, Allura stood up out of the way as the Paladins organized.  It was still early in the night-cycle—the whole thing had only taken up a handful of vargas, less than the grueling battle before it, but she could use a bath just as much as any of them right now.  They had come to this conclusion as well, bemoaning the fact that it would be at least another half-varga before they could even think about sleep. 

“And Keeeith,” Pidge whined, dragging his name out.  She went to scrub her eyes under her glasses and pulled back in disgust when she remembered how bloody her hands were.  “He’s covered in birthing ooze, can we just throw him in the tub or what?  Can we just throw all of us in the tub?  Can we throw the whole _castle_ in the tub?  I do not want to be cleaning this shit up in the morning.”

Hunk scrunched up his face as if in pain, swallowing a couple of times at ‘birthing ooze’.  In the end, they decided to just go for bath time—they were all so obviously exhausted that no one could find the strength to object about the impropriety of bathing Keith while he was basically unconscious.  “I’ve literally seen the inside of his muscles, a little bit of skin seems so much less frisky now,” Lance said, throwing his head back with a groan, and that about summed it up.

After they’d tucked Keith securely in the cleanest blanket they had, Hunk lifted him and began to trudge to the door.  He was like a roll of fabric in Hunk’s arms, his head lolling easily against Hunk’s shoulder.  To his credit, Hunk was sturdy even after the aches and pains of the day; he carried the boy gently and effortlessly.  Allura smiled, tilting her head as Red purred after them.  It was nice knowing that they were going to wash him and care for him.

“Hey… you’ll stop by later, won’t you?” Lance asked.  Allura startled.  She hadn’t noticed him pause on the way out, lingering at her side.  “You’re technically, y’know, one of the paladins.  You shouldn’t feel like you need to stay in the background all the time.”

“Oh!  I… of course.  I’ll ‘pop my head in’ as you say.”  She smiled, and he seemed to relax a little, giving her a small wave as he trotted after the others.  She could hear him whine once he was on the other side of the door, begging the others to slow down.

Then, feeling the weight of the universe, she perched on the Red Lion’s claw and breathed out slowly.

She couldn’t remember ever having had a day like this.  On the front lines of a battle lasting for hours, struggling to control a lion that seemed to be fighting her the entire time… only to come home and have to deal with her duties at the castle helm before everything devolved into chaos and fear and _screaming_.  This ship… it had always been in motion, from the moment it was created, taking Altean diplomats and warriors wherever the universe needed them.  She hadn’t grown up on the castle as the Paladins sometimes suggested—she’d grown up watching it come and go, sometimes with her father and sometimes without.  The stories of the people it held—of war refugees being transported and soldiers being healed, the feasts and grand meetings… well, for the longest time they were only stories, part of her lessons.  She wasn’t old enough to see for herself.  Until she was, and by then the war against the Galra was already getting out of hand and then her father was walking to his death and she woke up alone with only Coran, the only living members of a nearly-extinct race—

Well.  It just… it hadn’t been very long since the first time she’d encountered mortal injury firsthand.  Chronologically it might have been ten thousand years, but to her?  It had been only a handful.  She had more experience with it than the other Paladins, but she was still so young. 

Here she was again.  Back to feeling _young_ and _alone_.  She wasn’t ready to see some of the things she’d seen.  She probably never would be, not really, though that wouldn’t stop the memories from piling onto her.  They were now a part of her that she could never unsee.  A tear finally spilled over from one eye, and she brushed it away.  The way he’d screamed…

“You know, you deserve a bath as well, Princess,” came Coran’s tired voice.  She turned—he was nearly finished picking up all the bedding to wash.  He was hardly looking at her, which was unusual, but then again so were the obscene things speckling his normally immaculate uniform and how his hair was beginning to fall around his forehead, ordinarily slicked-back bangs coming loose.  His gloves were a mess, covered in blood right up to his third knuckles.

She knelt down beside him, snatching the last of the pillows up and depositing them in the chute near the door despite his insistence that he had it covered.  This was no job for just one man—the ship was not meant to hold only sev—six.  Six people.  No one should have to do this alone, she decided.  Besides, she was keeping an eye out on the other paladins via the mice and it really was the least she could do.

Once in Keith’s room, they were very efficient about it all.  More efficient than they usually were, especially after the last few disastrous movements they’d had, what with the explosive tempers and lion swapping and funerary ceremonies for fallen Blades.  The humans settled Keith in a bath, his head padded by a folded towel.  Pidge was looking after him, gently wiping every trace of the ordeal from his skin as Hunk took Lance away to shower, change, and dress the bite wound on his hand.  When they came back, they carefully hauled Keith out of the tub and into some pajamas, as Pidge set up what they needed to sleep and took care of herself.  They had obviously chosen to stay close by for the night.  Pidge waited patiently at the laundry shoot for the pillows and blankets Coran threw in to come back out, dragging all of the now-clean bedding to Keith’s room, where she spread it on the floor. 

It wasn’t long before all of them had settled in to sleep, various limbs flopped on top of other limbs.  Allura sighed, some strange mix of relief and wistfulness. 

“I’ve got this, I really do,” Coran said as she followed him to the medbay.  She didn’t say a word as she helped pull out cleaning supplies, rolling the long sleeves of her dress up to her elbows.  He sighed but allowed her to work at his side.  He always had a harder time accepting that their previous social order no longer existed—if they needed another soldier on the ground, who else was there to go but Allura, lineage be damned?—which also extended to cleaning duties like this.  She knew that he missed the days when the castle was in top shape, advisors and servants running it from behind the scenes.  But honestly… there was nothing in their lives today that wasn’t exceedingly messy.

She sat back when she remembered the holoscreens that had bounced around the command center, dozens of them come to life at a touch of Pidge’s fingers.  “Coran…” she began.

He hummed to let her know to go on. 

“Is it… is it a bad thing that I feel more… sad, than angry about everything we’ve learned today?”

“Well,” he said, never ceasing in his work.  “I suppose you wish you could feel angry because anger incites passion incites action.  But truth is, Princess… it’s okay to just _feel_ things.”

“As opposed to what?” she asked.  She stood up to strip the bed, throwing everything in the cleaning chute. 

“Weaponizing them.  It’s never a pretty thing, to weaponize too many of your emotions.”  He sighed.  “That was always one of the things that made me pity the Galra, even during our alliance with them.  They felt so strongly, without limits, and their leaders would turn around demanding that they use every scrap of it to promote their cause.  Grief was no longer grief, it was a demand for revenge, that sort of thing.  I couldn’t imagine living like that.  Tears people apart.”

Allura looked down at her dress, at the freshly stained knees and wrinkled front.  She thought of Keith—of his determination, which took on the force and inevitability of a falling star.  She wondered just how many tragedies Coran had to see. 

Well.  She supposed it would be alright to… feel her feelings tonight and find a plausible course of action tomorrow.  Come morning, she would have to follow up with the Olkari and contact the Blade to demand any information they could offer on this _torment_ the Empire had thought up.  Until then…

“Do you have anything else to clean?” she asked.  Coran waved her off for the third time, mentioning that there was just a wipe-down of the kitchen left for him to complete, so she finally took her leave.  She wanted to spend three hours in her bathtub, luxuriating in the feeling of sweat and grime lifting off her skin, but in no time at all she was out again, dressing herself in a nightgown and braiding her hair down her back.  It took just a few minutes to reach Keith’s door.   She could just barely hear Hunk snoring from the hallway.  The sound drew a smile from her. 

It was dark when she stuck her head inside—the only light was from Pidge’s computer, which was sitting open on Keith’s bed, playing a song from some musical Pidge had tried several times to explain.  As the light from the hallway lit the scene Allura saw Keith blink awake; he was curled up in Hunk’s embrace, his back to Hunk’s chest, facing the door.  In front of them, Lance and Pidge were back to back—Lance faced him, sprawled out with his head on his arm, the bandaged one curled up near his chest.  Pidge, meanwhile, was completely buried with her face under the blanket.  They were all clean, hair dried in funny ways against the pillows. 

Keith looked better than he had all day, perhaps longer.  The blankets had all been kicked away from him, she noted with a small smile, as she caught his eye.

“…It’s nice to see you awake,” she whispered, and waved when she saw the mice tucked up close to his chin.

“’M not, really… what’re you doing?” he asked, and yeah, he definitely sounded far from cognizant.

She smiled fondly.  “Just checking in.  How are you doing?”

He hummed, his eyes slipping closed.  “I don’t know my own face right now,” he said, moving a little like he was considering standing up to go look in the mirror.  Hunk made a snuffing noise against the back of his head.  Keith deflated, snuggling down again without much fight at all.  “Guess I’ll look in the morning,” he mumbled.

Allura laughed.  They were okay.  They were getting past this, and they would get past the hole Shiro left behind and… well.  It wasn’t going to be pleasant, but they would form Voltron again soon.  She believed in them.  All of them. 

Lance shifted and groaned, throwing an arm out toward her and accidentally whacking Pidge across the side.  Pidge spluttered, shoving back.  “Alluraaa…” he moaned.  “Stop letting in the liiight.”

“I’m sorry, I’m on my way out,” she said, moving to exit.

Lance only groaned louder.

“Or, I guess… do you mind if I join you?”

There was a small shuffle as everyone awake enough to listen moved to make room.  Keith patted the blanket he was lying on while Lance shimmied back into Pidge, pushing the youngest into the pile of shoes by the door.  Allura tiptoed all the way inside, letting the door close behind her, and contemplated her next move.  Was it… alright to settle down right in the middle?  She supposed so—there weren’t many other options.  With the utmost care, she lowered herself between Keith and Lance, allowing them to relax around her. 

“Is this alright?” she asked.  The only response she got was Lance throwing his arm over her stomach to grab Keith by the front of his pajamas, pulling him forward until his head rested on Allura’s torso.  Lance then established himself there as well, sighing softly.

“You are… super comfy.  You’re like a snuggie but… inside out,” he murmured nonsensically.  Allura tried desperately not to burst out laughing lest she woke everyone up.  The mice didn’t have any such qualms—they were rolling around on each other, letting out squeaks of merriment.  Lance wrinkled his nose.

“All right, all right—go to sleep, all of you,” Allura said.  She wrapped an arm around each of them, letting them know it was okay now, feeling their warmth soak through the chill she always picked up traversing the castle.  Keith had already drifted off again, nearly nose to nose with Lance, and she held them both as close as she could.

 

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two more chapters! The next one is done, but the last one is still a little holey so it won't go up immediately. Comfort time!
> 
> Cheers!


	8. In Which Kolivan Interupts a Nap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of all the vermin that make the Empire tick, the Druids are undoubtedly the worst. Kolivan may or may not have a personal vendetta against them. 
> 
> Knowledge or death... he wished the option for 'knowledge' was the kinder one, but alas... sometimes surviving was the harder choice.

The transmission was curt, and it came as if from behind, from the place you cannot see.  Kolivan had learned by now the human term for such a thing—a blindside.  He was blindsided.

Never.  _Never._   Had he heard of something such as this happening to a Galra as old as Keith.  Of course, everyone knew that Keith was young to be an active operative of the Blade of Marmora, much less a Paladin of Voltron, but this was—he wasn’t—to go through the _akomazot_ after reaching full growth or first molt was _unheard of_.

That was why, when the Blade was finally given permission to see the Paladin and had a secure enough connection to do so, there were at least twenty of them crammed into the space behind Kolivan’s console waiting intensely to scrutinize the kit’s second face.  He’d expected nothing less.  It had been two days since they were first contacted by Voltron about Keith’s status, and the suspense was lethal.

“Um.  Hello,” Keith said, blinking at the screen.

All around the Paladin, Kolivan could see signs of the other humans and occupants of the castle.  Covered plates of food, too many for him to feasibly eat in one sitting; bottles of cleansing ointments and calming scents; a device reminiscent of the heated plates the Blade used to warm sore muscles; too many pillows to count.  And there, in the middle, was Keith. 

Kolivan huffed a general greeting, allowing the rest of the Blades present to do the same as he scoured Keith’s visage for every change, every mild alteration, _every single detail_ of what the transformation decided to give or take.  His eyes raked up and down, from the crown of the kit's head to the sleeveless shirt clinging to his shoulders. 

He didn’t see anything he didn’t expect.  Fresh, unscarred skin.  A light coat of fur reminiscent of a newborn.  Markings along the bridge of his nose and along his paler throat, darker where his headfur was before—the fur there was brutally short, compared to what he formerly had.  He would likely molt at some point soon, revealing more refined markings.  For now, he had the soft edges of an infant, meant to accentuate the eyes.  His face was so much gaunter than it had been at his initiation—any stores of fat had been stripped to provide the energy required to complete the _akomazot_.  Kolivan looked underneath the expected exhaustion—young infants were known to succumb not to the pain of the shift but to the acute blood loss and malnourishment it caused, but it was less dire of a concern for someone as old as Keith—in search of… what, exactly, he didn’t know.  Signs that his newest Blade initiate was mentally sound?  That he’d retained all of his memories in the wake of immense physical and mental turmoil?

He felt a growl building low in his chest and pushed it down.  Keith was fine—his team had confirmed it.  Shaky, tired, and currently restricted to his sleeping quarters, but he was fine.

“You’ve been eating to regain your strength, I hope?” Kolivan said once the babble behind him had simmered down to a manageable level.  Keith was still hovering somewhere between confusion and uncertainty, watching them all, but he turned his gaze back to Kolivan as he spoke.

“Uh… yeah.  Trying to.  Though I’m having some… some trouble with that?” he said.  His eyes flickered back to the throng of Blades.  “Why is everybody here?  Isn’t this just a thing that sometimes happens?”

The muttering rose a little and Kolivan clenched his jaw.  “Do not be blasé about the ordeal.  Kits are lost during the process—from the physical strain and from social stigma both.”  He breathed out, inclining his head to the boy.  “You have suffered.”

“Oh.”  Keith fidgeted, adjusting the tablet on his lap.  “I just thought that… never mind.  You told Allura you could help me with nutritional changes?”

“Is there something you need that the Castle cannot provide?” Kolivan asked, leaning forward.

The boy ran his hands down his face, fresh lavender clawbeds straining as his claws caught on his skin, making him wince.  Those claws would need proper care—Kolivan made a note to send grooming tools just in case Allura could not provide them.  “See… that’s the thing?  I have absolutely no idea what I need.  I’ve been craving _something_ for days but I have no idea what it could possibly be.”

There was a murmur around the room, Blades turning to each other in whispers.  Kolivan’s ears flicked.  They brought up good points—most Galra were obligate carnivores, but a select few subsects were more designed as omnivores.  Many turned Galra retained very few traits from their other genetic heritage, but occasionally there were genes that won out despite the genomic conversion to Galra-dominant.  It would be very hard to tell what a newly turned Galra would require nutrient-wise without much trial and error.  The whispers rose, points fired back and forth as they argued the best foods to test.  Keith watched them with a certain tired wariness until Kolivan turned to one in particular, inviting him forward. 

There were several Blades at this base who had suffered through the process of _akomazot_.  About ten percent of their ranks were made of _akomatzi_ who were forced from their homes and somehow managed to evade the grasp of the Empire.  Until very recently, their go-to expert on the subject was Antok—he had been an _akomatzi_ , a turned, from a population of beings who were empathetic nearly to the point of being telepathic.  He had assisted in several transformations of younger Blade initiates and the children of Blades.  Never in anyone past the age of maturation, but he still would have been a valuable resource to the Paladins of Voltron had he been with them.

Unfortunately, at this point, it was unclear whether or not Antok would recover from the devastation wreaked upon them by the final battle against Zarkon (if indeed it was final—the Emperor held onto life like an under-dwelling vermin).  He was bedridden, stationed at an outpost designed to care for those who could not presently serve.  He was no longer around to help with matters such as this, though undoubtedly, he would have been invaluable.  They did have the next best thing, however.

“Regris, what are your thoughts?” Kolivan asked, calling the Blade forward.

Regris stepped up to the console, letting his tail flick repeatedly to one side, a motion of deference for a Voltron Paladin and a fellow Blade member.  “It would be an immense help to get a look at your mandiphagial traits.”

“What, like my teeth?” Keith asked, a spark of interest lighting his eyes.

“Teeth, yes.  Also scans of your digestive system, secondary traits such as claws, and eye anatomy.”

Keith snorted, wiggling his fingers in front of the screen.  “Got claws.  Probably means I’m mostly or partially carnivorous, right?”

Regris nodded.  “Most Galra are.  Your teeth might be able to tell us what kind of prey you’re best suited to ingest.”

Keith visibly clenched his jaw, wriggling it back and forth.  “Hang on, I’ve got some x-ray things from this morning I can show you.”  In a few short moments, he managed to pull up a full-screen scan of his upper and lower jaws, the live feed of his face sinking down into one of the lower corners.  Everyone leaned closer, pointing out the serrated ridges that lined each uniform point.  It wasn’t long before they were caught up in a new discussion about Galra subsect differentiation—not all of them even knew much about the topic, but they all sure had opinions.

They were in the middle of this when Kolivan caught movement at the bottom of the viewscreen—the Paladin’s mouth was stretched wide in a yawn that he was trying to cover with a palm.  Abruptly Kolivan raised one hand.  The rest of the Blades quieted.  “We have enough to work toward a satisfactory resolution to this problem.  The boy must rest,” he said.

One by one the others filed out, each of them offering condolences and phrases of strength that had Keith nodding in bewilderment.  “I get that it’s a serious issue, but I really didn’t think everyone would be so invested,” he said, once it was just him, Kolivan, and Regris, who was standing unobtrusively in the background looking over the rest of the scans that the Alteans sent along.

“Aside from dismantling the power structure of the Empire, one of our only main focuses is protecting the world against Druids,” Kolivan intoned.  “We are well aware how vile their practices are.  Between the _komar_ and the _akomazot_ we find no shortage of populations that we are spread too thin to protect, though we’ve tried.”

Keith hummed, tilting his head back against his pillows.  “Just one more thing to hate Zarkon for, I guess.”

“Is there anything else pressing that you wish to speak about before we leave you to your recovery?” Kolivan asked, after a moment of silence to acknowledge lives lost.

For a long time, Keith stayed completely still, his eyes nearly closed, head tilted back.  The exhaustion tugged on the strings of Kolivan’s own heart.  He waited patiently, simply watching, as Keith gathered his thoughts and finally struggled back into a more upright position.  “I’m not sure if I should even ask, honestly, but… what happens when the transformation is complete?”

Regris glanced at Kolivan, confusion marked in the curl of his tail, and Kolivan sat back with a low exhale.  “You mean when the transformation of the—what did your Green Paladin call it?  The nervous system?—is complete?”

Keith nodded, and Regris sucked in a breath under his mask.  At this point, Kolivan had started to come to terms with the situation.  This was not a newborn or a kit they were talking about: Keith was a few cycles past maturation, and even with the risky procedure the Alteans had coughed up to protect his brain he had lost much.  Physically he had regressed a great deal, and it was a miracle his mind was still intact.

“Well… the most common side effect is memory loss, often total.  The younger it happens, the easier it is to recover from, for obvious reasons.  I have heard…”

Here he paused, turning to face partially toward Regris before he went on.  “I have heard that for some, it is harder to mourn a loss of identity, but for others, it’s better to start as if with a blank slate.  You must understand—the _akomazot_ exists to divide populations and create Galra soldiers ripe for picking.  To muddle the lines between ‘Galra’ and ‘Non-Galra’.  _Akomatzi_ children are often rejected by their families, so it can be a relief to lose those memories.”

Regris nodded along, his tail flicking low near the floor with mild agitation.  “There is also often a change in instincts and emotions associated with the transformation.  Galra physiology is often very different from the other base species—as you well know—and the _akomatzi_ who are returned to their families might be different enough to raise suspicions about mind control.  It’s a well-documented phenomenon.”

“Those sound like… changeling myths,” Keith said, frowning.  “Or autism, maybe?  Are there autistic Galra?”

“Augh-tiz-tic?” Regris sounded out the name.

“It’s a developmental disability.  Um… basically, it means there’s something 'wrong' with your brain that impairs stuff like social development.  Usually, it first shows up in young kids, and sometimes their parents say stupid things like that their babies were ‘stolen’ from them.”  Here he cut his eyes to the side, pursing his lips just slightly.  “I have… I have autism.  At least, according to human developmental standards.”

Regris looked helplessly at Kolivan, who frowned.  “I’m… I’m not sure if there is an equivalent for Galra.  Most of the Empire is split into soldiers and non-soldiers, and soldiers must meet a specific requirement for health and ambition.  I’ve only ever been among their ranks.”

“Huh.”  Keith was quiet for a moment, tipping his head to the side.  “I mean… a lot of autistic people can still do the things normal people do?  Not without a lot of backlash and abuse, though, that’s really common.”

“Will you be okay?” Regris asked softly, a hint of distress in his voice even with the vocal modulator.  “You haven’t had to deal with such things, have you?”

“Well… on Earth, sure.  It’s okay, though, I mean… I haven’t really had difficulties in space.  And during the transformation, everyone but Shiro was with me the whole time.  None of them seem worried that I’m going to go off the rails because of Galra hormones.  I don’t think anybody cares that I’m the first autistic Galra.”

He seemed like he was about to open his mouth and say something else, an odd twist to his lips, when one of the other paladins burst into the room, yelling, “Nope!  No no no no nope, I heard what you’re talking about and I’m shutting it down, right here right now.  Hello Kolivan, how are you Kolivan, goodbye Kolivan—”

Kolivan watched, unamused, as the one called Lance plucked the tablet from Keith’s hands.  “Hey!” Keith snarled, swiping for it, but Lance was already striding out of the room.

“Lance,” Kolivan said, instilling a rumble underneath his words that caused Regris to stiffen beside him.  “ _Return the tablet._ ”

Lance swallowed wrong and started coughing, his eyes wide.  He fumbled, nearly dropping the tech.  It would have been very satisfying, if not for his refusal to comply.  “I’m sorry, Sir.  Uh, Mr. Blade, Sir.  With all due respect, though, I’ve been trying to convince Keith to take a nap for the last three hours and he gets _really antsy_ when the autism thing comes up.”

With a huff of air that was as close to a sigh as Kolivan ever came, he gave a curt nod.  “You will let him call again at the next clear signal.  Is this understood?”

“Completely, Sir.”

“Good.”

And then they were at a standstill.  Lance was making almost-eye-contact, his fingers tapping on the edges of the screen, the picture of awkward.  The only reason Kolivan hadn’t hung up on him unceremoniously was the way he kept glancing back toward Keith’s door.

“What is it?” Kolivan finally ground out.  “My time is not infinite.”

Lance jumped.  “Oh!  Right, right.  I just…”  He lowered his voice.  “Did he say anything about, um, Shiro?  Like, for instance about how he’s coping with the fact that the person closest to family that he has is missing during such an important transition?”

Kolivan was willing to bet that his eye was going to start twitching before the conversation was over.  “Shouldn’t these concerns be brought to him directly instead of talking over a video transmission feed to someone who it _does not involve_?” he asked. 

Flinch.  “Right!  Right!  Yes, most definitely!  That’s… I’ll just, I’ll just be going—”

“Paladin.”

He hadn’t thought Lance could raise his shoulders any higher, but apparently, he could.  “Yes?” he squeaked.

Kolivan felt his face softening against his volition.  “Let us say a proper farewell to the kit.  We will be quick.”

Lance agreed, and Kolivan staunchly ignored the look Regris was boring into the side of his head.  In moments Lance had entered Keith’s room again, padding in quietly with the tablet held outward.  “Keithy… I’m sorry about taking this, please don’t throw anything at me—”

He fell silent as he neared the bed.  Keith had succumbed to his exhaustion in the handful of ticks they’d been conversing in the hall—he had tipped over on his side, curled up against his pillows, now breathing slow and heavy.  His claw-tips twitched.  He was obviously well on his way to deep sleep.  Lance sighed, reaching past the screen to pull his blankets up over his shoulder.

“He’s out,” he whispered, backing up again.  “I _told_ you he was due for naptime.  Look at him, he’s like a kitten, just falling asleep wherever.  He probably conked out sitting up.”

Kolivan had to agree, though he had no idea what a kitten was.  Or… conking?  Was that a human thing?  Regris looked equally confused.

“Okay,” Lance said, once the door had closed once again.  “You’ll talk to him again soon.  Promise.”

Kolivan nodded, though it was mostly to himself seeing as Lance still had the tablet facing the wrong direction.  “Notify Allura that our capsule will contain a few supplementary food items as well as the data we have on the _akomazot_.  If they suffice to help his food cravings the castle should be well equipped to replicate most of them, though there are a few that may need to be shipped in.  We will also be sending along Galra hygiene care products with instructions.  If anything should change in the near future, do not hesitate to inform us.”

Lance swung the screen around again to look at them in shock.  “You’re making him a care package?!” he demanded, letting his mouth hang open.  “What the heck, that's actually adorable, I didn’t think you guys would—"

“If you mean a package containing items for his care, yes.  Are we done here?” Kolivan said, letting his tone tell Lance that this was not a question.  He was tapping one claw on the underside of the console, his patience thinning.  These humans and their need for conversation.  Every transmission to Voltron seemed to take three times as long as was required to exchange necessary information.  He turned the feed off as soon as he saw Lance beginning to nod.

“I have enough information to oversee the food preparations,” Regris said, standing at attention.

Kolivan inclined his head.  “I trust you to add anything you think is necessary.”

"And Sir…"

"Yes, Regris?"

Regris flicked his tail quickly back and forth in agitation.  "We'll send someone along to give him a full examination soon, won't we?  For… medical purposes?"

"Not to worry," Kolivan said, standing to his full height.  "I will accompany a medic myself to make sure he's healing at an acceptable rate."

He felt more than heard Regris let out a breath beside him, the last of his worries put to rest.  Kolivan couldn't help but feel the same.

 

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry you're gonna have to wait a hot second for the last chapter, forgive me.


	9. The Day Hunk Gets to Finally Feed Keith in His Kitchen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's been a saga, to say the least. Hunk knows what the real toll looks like, maybe more than anyone. Trying to get food into a cranky Keith is a full-time job, which is why today is all the more important.
> 
> They're going to be a family again, if it's the last thing he does.

It was Voltron, day fifty post-Shiro’s Houdini act, and Keith was having a bad time.  Still not bad like the time Hunk accidentally offended the Balmerans by insinuating that he wanted their living home to crack under their feet, though.  Translator mishaps just couldn’t compare to some of the shit that came in Keith's direction. 

Keith's life was just not glamorous, was the short of it.  His only unwavering support was still missing after vanishing into thin air, he was still in a position of leadership he wasn’t currently suited for, and he was still being forced to move past losing someone for the second time.  And of course, the cherry on the top of that milkshake of misery was the horrible slasher-esque shapeshifter transformation he'd endured at the hands of an Empire Druid.  Hunk knew it was bad.  He knew it more than ever, these days.  He really, sincerely, was starting to understand why Kolivan always looked so constipated.

Keith was on the mend now, though.  It took a few quintants for him to get up and walk around unassisted, even for a few doboshes at a time, but he was managing now.  He’d lost a lot of his muscle mass—his body had to atrophy a great deal to get rid of the stuff it didn’t want, leaving him a bit like a little infant all over again.  He was obviously itching to get back up in arms, so having to slowly build his strength back up had forced his pride to take a serious hit.  But not for long!  Hunk was diligent about getting him fattened back up. 

It helped that they’d _finally_ figured out what the hell Keith had been craving this whole time.  It was a compound found in a specific type of fish that was once native to Daibazaal.  A bottle of fish-oil capsules came with a package of information from the Blade, many of whom were quite distraught when they heard what had happened, to the point that they were getting several messages per day from different Blade bases.

It turned out that even though the Galra Gland was present in many mixed-bloods, it often didn’t kick into gear without a prod from concentrated Galra quintessence, a fact that most of the pro-Empire literature left out.  Subjugated communities were forced to send their mixed children to the Druids, who would kick-start the transformation and send back the children who didn’t die during the process.  It was a fairly disgusting practice, one that Kolivan had created an entire sect of the Blade to combat.  None of them had ever seen Kolivan so worked up—it was apparently an issue very close to his heart.  Antok, he’d told them, was banished from his original home after being returned to his family with the face of a Galra.  Others at the Blade had survived attempts on their lives by loved ones and been forced to flee.  He had assumed up until this point that Keith’s Galra blood was too diluted for the gland to be present, or too underdeveloped to be triggered even purposefully, especially after hearing that Keith was once doused in pure quintessence and nothing happened.

The news must have been one heck of a surprise.  Hunk will never shake Kolivan’s thunderous, “A DRUID _WHAT_?” from his subconscious.  Every time he looked at a Druid from that moment on he was going to think of that yell.  The sheer, hair-raising anguish present as the leader of the Blade of Marmora asked to see Keith, to make sure he was okay, was going to haunt Hunk for the rest of his life.

Right now, though, Hunk was focused on preparing their first group meal since The Incident—since Day Forty-Three, the day one asshole Druid knocked down the one devastatingly effective domino that managed to topple Keith’s whole world.  Or was it Day Zero that the first domino fell?  A case could be made for Shiro's disappearance being the very first in the cascade, but either way, the joke was on the empire because _nothing_ could keep Keith down, not even having his body turned inside out.  If they thought he would be theirs for the taking they had another thing coming.  Team Voltron had survived a hundred battles against the Empire, and they weren’t about to back down now. 

Team Voltron also deserved something good today, which was why Hunk was planning a feast.  He intended to bring his A game—it was going to be so good that Jesus himself would weep at the taste.

And yet… Hunk set down his mixing bowl, biting his lip.  Something still felt off, like there was something missing.  A hole with jagged edges right in the middle of it all.  He tried to organize his thoughts, to sort out why he still felt bereft even after daily news that Keith’s recovery was going well, and the words that came out of his mouth after a minute of deep meditation were: “Do you… do you guys think he’s thought about what Shiro’s reaction is going to be?”

Pidge was at the table, sifting through the last data-stick that came in the care package, the holoscreen lighting her face with an eerie blue glow.  She looked up at the question.  She, Hunk, and the Alteans were the only ones in the kitchen currently.  Lance was in charge of slowing Keith down enough to not hurt himself, so they wouldn’t be seeing either of them until dinner time.  It was just them.

Humming a tune somewhere between thoughtful and dismissive, Pidge set her tablet down to adjust her glasses.  “He probably has, Hunk.  Shiro is incredibly important to him, I can’t imagine that he hasn’t thought about it a little bit.”

“Right,” Hunk murmured, starting to stir again in wide, sweeping motions.  “Right.  It’s just, uh… what _do_ you think Shiro’s reaction is going to be?”

Pidge was silent for a long moment, fiddling with the data stick.  Coran began piddling with one of the platters waiting to go out to the table, and though Hunk watched him closely in case he tried to sneak in any unsavory spices, he just seemed to want something productive to pretend to be doing.  Allura sighed.

“Well,” Pidge said, finally, several minutes after the room started feeling incredibly awkward.  “I’m willing to bet that Shiro has… seen a lot of things since coming to space.  He’s the reason we had translated records to look at, during the whole event.  So… he already probably knows it was a possibility.”

A beat.  This was the first time in a week that anyone had been able to slow down enough to just… think about it.  Not the scattered thoughts that plagued them all just after they collapsed into bed, exhausted from fighting with only four lions _again_ , just before they fell asleep— _really, truly think about it_. 

“He will take it in stride,” Allura said.  She looked around, her gaze hardening into resolve.  The confidence in her voice barely wavered.  “He was the first to take Keith’s side after our introduction to the Blades—there is no one in the universe who protects someone as devoutly as he does Keith unless it’s Keith protecting him.”

Hunk tilted his head, spooning out the last of alien filling #4 into the waiting centers of alien doughball recipe #2.  He wanted to believe that as much as she clearly did.  “Makes a lot of sense,” he hedged.  Only, what if this was a line crossed that Keith could never come back from?  What if Shiro could never look him in the eye again?  What if this was a wedge driven between them?  _What if his new face hurt Shiro, caused him flashbacks or panic attacks?_   God, Keith would never forgive himself.

“Hunk, I can smell your anxiety burning a hole through your headband,” Pidge said.

“Sorry," he sighed.

In no time at all everything was done, plated, and ready to spread across the table.  And still, Hunk found himself worrying, readjusting garnishes and switching the order of the platters, just like Coran was doing beside him.

Rolling her eyes, Pidge stood up to help move things to the table, giving them both an encouraging smile that Hunk tried to return.  She was right.  Totally right.  He didn’t need to worry about it yet.  There was an order of operations here—worrying about finding Shiro trumped worrying about Shiro’s theoretical future mental health issues.

Still, they were all silent and lost in thought when Lance came sauntering in with a chirped, “Hello, everybody!”  He grinned at them all.  “Grumpy Cat is almost here, is everything ready?”

Hunk hurriedly swept the last of the food onto the table, feeling the excitement starting to bubble up in his chest again.  They were going to share a dinner at the table, all six of them, for the first time in who knew how long.  Keith was healing, mentally and physically.  After so long trying to distance himself, refusing to accept help from anyone but Shiro, he was finally letting them in, and Hunk was READY.

Oh, man, he was probably going to cry.  He could feel it already.  He sniffed loudly, preemptively wiping his eyes as Lance winked at them, throwing an arm toward the open door.  “And—the guest of honor, Keith Cryptid Kogane!” Lance announced, in proper butler fashion. 

The doorway remained empty.  Hunk waited, his fists clenched in front of his chest in anticipation.  Any moment now.  _Any moment_.

Apparently not.  “Oi, get your purple butt in here already!” Lance called, flapping his outstretched hand.  Nothing.  With a drawn-out groan, he threw his head back.  “Oh my _goood_.  You’d think he’d be a little quicker on the uptake, judging by how much he loves to ram his _furry little noggin_ against anything that doesn’t move out of his way fast enough.”

The words drew a twisted smile from Keith, who was just now limping around the doorway, a few moments late.  _Fashionably late_ , Hunk decided, with a decisive nod.  He did a little dance in place, ushering Keith toward his seat. 

Keith gave him a nod in greeting before he reached hesitantly for Lance’s hand to keep his balance.  “Hey, Lance, why do you have to say things in the worst possible way every single time?” he asked brightly.  He was obviously too thrilled being up and about to put energy into his pout.

Lance waved him off, shoving him so lightly that it was nothing more than a love-tap.  Now that Keith had been up and around the castle a few times, standing at his full height, it was brutally clear that Coran’s height system was going to need some tweaks.  Watching as Lance held him like he was escorting a little old rich lady, Hunk wondered offhand if Keith was as tall as him now.  Could be.  And judging by the Blades’ comments, they expected him to grow quite a bit more.  Hopefully, he would put on some more weight before that happened, because he was incredibly noodly at the moment.  Without something to hold onto, he had a hard time standing straight.  Hunk could wrap his entire hand around his bicep with room to spare.  Right now, he was more like a strand of spaghetti than a person. 

Keith had _not_ appreciated that comment when Hunk made it to his face yesterday, which had also caused him to revoke Hunk’s helping-hand privileges in a moody fit.  Contenting himself with tapping his fingers eagerly, Hunk waited for Lance to guide their guest of honor all the way into his allocated seat, which was the one right in the middle of the festivities. 

Lance pulled back with a deep bow and a knuckle-kiss that made Keith wrinkle his nose.  “I’m serious, why are you like this?” Keith asked, his cheeks flushing dark under the fur.  The color was cute, especially because it signified that he was regaining the blood volume that he'd lost, looking healthier every day.  Also because he flushed a deep burgundy.  Like a red cabbage salad.  It made Hunk want to soundly squish his furry little face.

At least he wasn't the only one.  “I’ll have you know that I’ve literally never _not_ been embarrassing,” Lance was saying, smug, and with an impudent grin, he reached over to pinch one bright pinkish-purple cheek like it was the cheek of a little stuffed bunny, catching Keith off-guard.  Keith slapped him away with a laugh.

It was the laugh that finally relaxed Hunk enough to grin like he hadn’t in too long now.  It felt so _good_ —nothing like the strained, polite smiles he’d been dishing out to potential coalition allies for so many weeks now.  He served up the food like he was listening to his favorite melody, the buzz of conversation picking up around the room.

Yeah… this was good.  Better.  Getting there.  He pushed a full plate in front of Keith and sat down.  It didn’t take very long from there for someone to steer the talk toward Keith’s second face. 

“So, what’s the part that’s weirding you out the most about—” Pidge gestured to Keith’s entire body “—this?”

 _Probably everything_ , Hunk thought, sympathetically.  Keith, like him, used physical outlets to manage emotional stress.  For Hunk it was cooking, and for Keith it was training.  Being on bedrest was killing him, and that wasn’t even touching on the rest of the caboodle.

Swallowing slowly, Keith ran a hand self-consciously over his nearly-bald head.  “Is it strange that it’s my hair?  I never cut it because I didn’t like having to adjust to it every time, and now it’s just _gone_.  It’s driving me nuts.”

“But you’re completely cool with, for instance, the shark chompers?” Lance asked, making a shark mouth with one hand and making it gnaw on one of the pseudo-rolls on the platter in the middle of the table.  To his right, Allura leaned over to Coran to ask what a shark was.

Keith waved a hand, clicking his teeth together like he did every time someone brought them up.  “Eh.  When I don’t think about them I can’t even tell anything changed.  It feels pretty natural.”

“Hey—smile for me real quick,” Pidge called, leaning closer.  He grimaced, displaying his teeth.  She adjusted her glasses, tilting precariously over her plate to squint closely at the sharp points.  “Yo Coran, are there aquatic Galra?” she asked.

Coran was quick to respond.  “Not very many, no.  They’ve been all but extinct for millennia now.”  A moment later he stood up to get a better angle from which to poke at Keith, blatantly examining him right at the dinner table despite Keith repeatedly smacking his hands away and grumbling about wanting to eat.  Keith's face twisted into a scowl when Coran took hold of his chin to cant his entire head to the side, peering into his ear.  After a moment, Coran announced that “Actually, judging by your aural cavities I’d be unsurprised if you’re from an amphibious subsect!”

Keith blinked, disgruntled.  Lance burst out laughing.  “Oh my god, he’s a frog!” he yelled, prompting Keith to throw a bone at him.

“That makes no sense.  Why do I still have hair?” Keith demanded, frowning.  “Amphibians don’t have hair, right?”

“It could be a first coat.  All Galra kits are born with fur that some lose during their first molt, when their scales come in.  That’s also the time that tails usually appear, so I imagine that could be in your future.  Or maybe not!  Who knows!”  Coran grinned, like the possibility of Keith pupating and growing a tail was akin to winning the lotto.

“Wait, back up… he has _baby fuzz_?”  Lance had obviously picked up very little from the entire conversation, and he looked downright gleeful about what little he got.  Keith huffed a long-suffering sigh. He tried to pick up his spork again only to be blocked by Pidge holding his hand down so she could snap a picture of him. 

“You know, you’re really not as Galra-y as I thought you’d be," she told him frankly, examining the still on a holoscreen and blowing the image up until it was nothing but an uncomfortable close-up of his nostrils, which were almost slitted but not quite.  "I was expecting some huge bat ears, honestly.” 

With a glimmer in his eye, Lance speared a large triangular pastry on his spork and held it up against Keith’s head.  Pidge snapped another picture before Keith could react, snickering.  "You look adorable," Lance cooed, and then yelped as Keith twisted and took a chunk out of the pastry before he could pull it back.  Everyone burst out laughing at the look of betrayal on his face.

“Look, as long as I can still pilot Black, I really don’t care what I look like,” Keith said, cutting through the humor with his blunt honesty when he’d obviously decided he’d had enough of them.  “I’ve always been Galra by blood.  Black didn’t seem too put out by the physical transformation, so as soon as I get my stamina back we’ll get back to our previous schedule of universe defending.”

“Oh, have you been down to talk to Black?” Allura asked, eagerly steering the conversation away from more earth-animal comparisons that she didn't understand.

At that, however, Keith seemed to shrink a little.  “Ah.  Not… no.” 

There was something in Keith’s voice that pulled everyone up short.  “What does that mean?” Pidge asked, eyes sharp and calculating.  “You never mentioned having a long-distance connection with her like you did with Red.  Are you Black’s official paladin now?”

“ _God_ , no!”  He looked absolutely affronted at the thought. 

Hunk squinted.  “Is it a _Galra thing_?” he asked.  The Galra were an incredibly diverse race, he wouldn’t be surprised if they had some kind of weird sensory organ that was super attuned to quintessence.  Though he felt the need to specify: “I mean like, a real-life Galra thing, because you’re actually a real-life Galra now.  You know, like mind _and_ body.”

Well, that was the wrong thing to say.  He flinched away from Keith's snarl.  “Hunk, I was _just as Galra before_ as—"

“Ooh!  I bet you got some freaky powers from all that quintessence!” Lance called, tossing a small fruit in the air and trying to catch it in his mouth.  He missed but didn’t seem to care in the slightest as it bounced across the room, his eyes lighting up.  “Yo Allura, you do magic, is Keith a Druid now?”

“I’m _not a fucking_ —"

"Keithy, hush, I want to hear this."

"…Of course you do."

Allura tilted her head, looking eagerly at Coran.  “It's an interesting question—the effects of quintessence are still mostly undocumented, though I'm sure we could find reports on magic in turned Galra if we looked through our downloads.”  She tapped her spork against her plate, animated.  “I’d imagine that it’s still very unlikely since magic like that was incredibly rare in Galra back during our alliance, but—"

Keith sighed, letting the table buzz overpower whatever argument he was trying to make.  Hunk shrugged a little when he caught the Galra’s glare.  What, he thought it was a fair question.  It wasn’t his fault everyone decided to take it and run with it.

Speaking of.  “Druids are extremely unnatural beings,” Coran was saying thoughtfully, stroking his moustache.  “They didn’t exist before the Rift opened on Daibazaal.  I suppose we’ll have to tell you all the story of the Galra home planet some day.  The Rift really was a nasty bugger.”

“The _what_?” Pidge demanded.

“The Rift!  A hole in the fabric of space-time!”

“Wait, I'm confused is Keith magic or—?”

“—Druid genetic alteration probably—”

“—came from the longstanding tradition of—”

“—if you flip a coin in front of—"

“—uh, no, obviously it’s a Vader thing—"

Pidge cut everyone off by slamming her hands on the table.  “Stop distracting me, I want to know about Keith’s weird paladin bond!” she yelled.

“It’s nothing like that,” Keith sighed. 

Pidge gestured for him to continue.

He did, keeping his eyes on his plate.  “It’s just… when we were down there.  In the hangars, I mean.  I, um… don’t actually remember most of it, but I know that there was a moment when I kind of… left my body?  I was floating above everyone and the lions were _right there_.  It was like I could see their souls or whatever.  And I thought Black was just going to watch me from the distance or judge me or whatever, but she was really insistent that I go back into my body."  He shrugged like he was trying to shrug off the heavy implications of that.  "Anyway, I have no idea what was up with her, but she made it pretty apparent that I'm not getting out of piloting anytime soon.”

“That was an out-of-body experience.  Or possibly a near-death experience,” Lance said, matter-of-factly.  Hunk nodded along—he’d heard a similar story from a friend of his moms’.  Lance continued.  “My uncle had one once.  He was in this really bad car wreck, and while they were on the way to the hospital he says he sat up and looked down at himself.”

"You're talking about a _spirit slip_ ," Coran said.  Like always, he sounded much too bright for such a serious topic.  Like spirits coming loose from their moorings was teatime gossip.  "Now, if you want well-documented, there's a topic to look up!  We've got literature on spirit slips that goes back to King Groggery the Infirm.  In fact, some old Altean Alchemists practiced separating their minds from their bodies on purpose!  It's one of the key characteristics that allowed Alfor to create the Lions in the first place.  He had to  _slip beyond_ his physical limitations to conjure the spirit of the comet and let it guide his hands."

Now looking wistful, Coran propped his head on a knuckle, a faint smile on his face.  He didn't seem to notice the concerned looks that Pidge and Hunk were trading.

"Hey, does anyone else feel like we're kind of describing the Lion bonds?" Lance asked into the vacuum.  "I mean, obviously not all of the time, but when we need to form Voltron and we go all slippery?"

"It's not like we die every time we form Voltron, though."

"Well, obviously I know that, Pidge, but you can't tell me that doing a mental slip-n-slide isn't a little bit like having some kind of out-of-body experience.  Right, Keith?"  He held out a hand expectantly.

"Sure, but it just… it was the same but different."  Keith blew out hard, the curve of his spine growing more pronounced like he was starting to feel the weight of his own body.  He must have been tired, but he didn't let it go—it was like he _needed_ to explain it now that he'd started, needed to get them to understand, his clawed hands moving to illustrate the words.  "It wasn't that I was following the bond toward you guys to sync up, it was like I was totally unanchored for a moment.  Like I… could have just kept going and there was nothing there to stop me.  Like I was in a place with no boundaries except whatever limit I picked."

Hunk laughed nervously.  "Well, that sounds intense.  And scary.  Like wow, I think I would have been really, really scared."  His voice was just barely too loud.  He fell silent again very fast.  This was… not the direction he wanted the dinner conversation to go.

Keith sighed.  “Yeah.  Shiro… Shiro talked to me once about a feeling like that.  Though he said in his case it was probably dissociation and not _death_ or whatever, so maybe—I don't know.  Maybe I'm just pulling shit out my ass.”

From the corner of his eye, Hunk saw Pidge shrink at the mention of Shiro’s name and what he’d gone through at the hands of the Empire.  Or maybe it was guilt—maybe she was remembering the time a few weeks back when she let Hunk convince her to eavesdrop on Black’s commlink when Keith was out alone, practicing maneuvers.  It was before the transformation, before Keith felt safe enough among them to even come close to opening up about his loss.

He’d been talking to himself, on the comm line.  Except… not himself.  It was like he was talking to Black, only the way he said _you_ was so unexpectedly soft in a way that they’d never heard before, not even when he spoke to Red.  Soft and… sad.  It took them five whole minutes to realize that when he spoke out loud to Black, his words were really for Shiro, and then they exchanged stricken looks before booking it out of there and never mentioning it again.

The same exact thing was going to happen right here, right now, if no one stepped in and buoyed Shiro’s name back up instead of letting it sink into a mire of guilt-shame-grief.  The mood was coming down, and fast.  All around him, the paladins and Alteans were giving each other the Looks, the ones silently prompting one another to _just do it, someone comfort him, please god someone just do it_ —

And you know what?  No.  Hunk was _tired_ of this.  He was done shying away from Shiro’s shadow, staying in the background and hoping that Lance would keep stepping up as their designated Keith ambassador, that today wouldn’t be one of the days that Keith exploded in his face when he tried to help.  He didn’t want to watch all the people he cared about struggle to sand down all of their torn edges, praying that they’d fit together again one day.

So he reached out to the middle of the table, right through all the unease and the tension, and speared one of the teeny little sausages from Arus.  “I don’t know anything about the difference between dissociation and death, but man, Shiro once told me that ketchup is basically a smoothie and I still haven’t recovered.”

The silence could have gone either way.  Toward grief, or toward healing.  Or maybe toward healing through grief.  In the static of a space desperately trying to realign itself, Hunk looked over at Keith.  He wasn’t sure what he expected—the Keith here today was a Keith who was tired, true, but he was also so much more open than the Keith who entered battle with them a week ago.  He found Keith’s eyes locked on him. 

And then, like light cascading from the heavens, Keith started to laugh.  He laughed so hard that Lance started thumping him on the back, worried that he was choking, and Pidge accidentally knocked over an entire pitcher of space juice trying to hand it over.  Conversation picked up again, anew, everyone sharing quirky stories about Shiro.  It was like a dam bursting, flooding them all and washing out the darkness and the tension.  It was the first easy conversation about Shiro that they’d had in fifty days. 

And there was Keith, right in the middle of it, head cocked to one side as he listened.  After a while, he settled his chin on his arms, sleepy-blinking as he watched everyone talk over each other.  His lips twitched with mirth every few seconds.  Hunk was almost certain that he didn’t notice Hunk watching him carefully, checking in, until he turned his head to look him straight in the eye.  A smile was curling up one side of his lips, something soft and tired yet more relaxed than Hunk had seen on him in a long, _long_ time.  That look was drastically different from the last time the two of them were together in the kitchen/dining area, the complete opposite of the pain and grim determination.

“You okay?” Hunk asked, a stage whisper across the table.  No one was paying him any attention, bemoaning Shiro’s insistence that they add cardio to every training session as Allura tried to defend his honor.

“Don't worry,” Keith said back.  "I’m getting there."

 

***

* * *

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OKAY THERE IT IS. This has been in progress for sooooo looooong oh my god. Let me know what you think! Come say hi at the-ghost-of-keith-kogane.tumblr.com if you want!
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> EDIT: Aight maybe I ought to do this properly. 
> 
> -IF YOU WANT MORE LIZARD GALRA STUFF, GO HERE: http://the-ghost-of-kirishima-eijirou.tumblr.com/tagged/lizard%20galra  
> -You can also come talk to me about Lizard Galra or Galra Keith or Lizard Keith or any combination of the above because it's an AU I LOVE.  
> -This fic can be read as literally any Keith ship. For most of them it's kind of pre-shippy (like Klance--you can still read it as Klance but Lance obviously still has a ways to go before he's ready for that), but hey, the themes are there.  
> -I mean pretty much any Keith ship, dudes. Heith? Hell yeah. Kallura? Oh definitely. Keitor? Well they're both Galra hybrids so you can imagine what they'd have in common (also in this verse, Lotor is an akomatzi as well, because Zarkon wasn't going to have a son with the face of an Altean, no siree. He still retains a few of his Altean features simply because Altean genes and Galra genes both tend to be dominant and the transformation can only do so much)  
> -...If you really want to know what the first domino was, it was Shiro. Shiro was the first domino. You'll notice that this is p much canon compliant up until the end of season 2, which means Keith HAS been zapped by a Druid and doused in quintessence. He didn't transform then because he wasn't under quite enough stress (Druids who trigger the akomazot basically torture children. that's... that's the lowdown.)  
> -I am 100% open to ideas for other fics in this verse! If you want me to write something specific just shoot me the idea and I'll ponder it!  
> -When you comment, please feel free to let me know what you think about Keith's brain. Do you think the transformation is going to trigger again at some point in the future? Do you think he's a-okay now? Do you want to see him lose most of his memories?  
> -...I ask because I have an amnesia fic already started that could fit very well in this verse with just a few tweaks. It's up to you guys whether or not it fits the storyline ;D  
> -Go ahead and critique if you want to! I'm always looking for ways to make my writing better. Also I can't fuxking stand typos, so if you see one PLS TELL ME.  
> -DAY ONE AND THIS FIC HAS FIFTY KUDOS I AM SO GLAD THAT THERE ARE PEOPLE OUT THERE WHO ENJOY HURTING KEITH AS MUCH AS I DO THANK YOU ALL FOR COMING
> 
> CHEERS!

**Author's Note:**

> ...you don't know this yet, but after he molts Keith is going to lose his fur and grow scales. He's a lizard. Lizard galra. I'm gonna write at least one more story in this verse because LIZARD GALRA. (sorry krolia, haha)


End file.
